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The South Wind 

AND 

©tber Sermons 



By 

T. Harwood Pattison, D. D. 

Late Professor in Rochester 
Theological Seminary 

Author of ^^The Making of the Sermon " 

" Public Worship " 

"The History of Christian Preaching," etc. 



rtpi 



PHILADELPHIA 

Bmcrican JBaptist ipubltcation Society? 
1905 






Two Copies asc&veti 

^PR 1 1905 






Copyright 1905 by the 
American Baptist Publication Society 

Published April, 1905 



jfrom tbe ©octets '0 own prces 



INTRODUCTION 



This volume of sermons is issued in accordance 
with the wish and direction of the alumni of the 
Rochester Theological Seminary, and the chairman 
of the alumni committee is asked to write an intro- 
ductory word. He does so in grateful memory of 
a beloved teacher and friend, to whom our great 
brotherhood, scattered through every land, is under 
obligations which never can be met. 

Thomas Harwood Pattison was born in Launces- 
ton, Cornwall, England, December 14, 1838. His 
education was received in' England and Germany, 
and included instruction in the University College 
School of London, Regent's Park College of Lon- 
don, then under the distinguished presidency of 
Doctor Angus, and the private tutorage of Henry 
George Tomkins. For four years he was under 
training in an architect's office, and these years had 
much to do with developing in him that love of the 
stately and beautiful in architecture which was to 
mean so much to his students. 

At twenty-three years of age the twenty years 
of pastoral service began, first at Hude Chapel, 
Middleton, 1 862-1 863 ; then at Rye Hill Chapel, 
Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1 864-1 870; then at West 
Street Chapel, Rochdale, Lancashire, 1 870-1 875. 
During these years of notable service in England his 
reputation was constantly increasing. Sermons and 



IV INTRODUCTION 

addresses beyond the limits of his own parish made 
him widely known, and warm friendships were 
formed with such men as Dr. Alexander McLaren, 
Doctor Dale, and Dr. John Clifford, which endured 
through life. Here too, ceaseless and tireless toil 
developed that delightful and striking literary style 
which charmed and held the mind and heart of all. 

But England was not to have the best of this 
great life. In January, 1875, Doctor Pattison came 
to America, and at the age of thirty-seven began a 
pastorate of four years in the First Baptist Church 
of New Haven, Conn. Under the shadow of Yale 
University, and with such parishioners as Dean 
Wayland, of the Yale Law School, it is small wonder 
that the ripened powers of the preacher found full 
play ; yet he had not reached his place of greatest 
usefulness, though he knew it not. In 1879, the 
Emmanuel Church of Albany, N. Y., persuaded him 
to accept its pastorate, and for two years in the cap- 
ital city of the Empire State he wielded an influence 
which was felt far and wide. The beautiful mem- 
ories of this pastorate still linger in Albany. 

In 1 88 1 Doctor Pattison was invited by the trus- 
tees of the Rochester Theological Seminary to fill 
the professorship of Homiletics and Pastoral The- 
ology in that institution. In September of that 
year he entered upon a service in the seminary 
which ceased only with his death, February 13, 1904. 
It is by the years of his service in the seminary 
that he will be longest remembered, for here was 
the crown and flower of his work. 

Such are the brief outlines of a singularly full 
life. During Doctor Pattison's years in Rochester 



INTRODUCTION V 

his activity was not confined to his own classroom. 
Almost every Lord's Day found him in some pul- 
pit. Colleges and universities almost without num- 
ber counted his presence and his message an in- 
spiration. Yale, Cornell, Brown, Williams, Rochester, 
Vassar, Virginia, and many more knew and loved 
him. During intervals in pastorates he served as 
stated supply for such churches as the First, Second, 
Lake Avenue, and Park Avenue of Rochester, and 
the Delaware Avenue of Buffalo. He was gladly 
welcomed also outside of his own communion ; he 
frequently filled the pulpits of the Brick, St. Peter's, 
and the Third Presbyterian Churches in his own 
city, and very many beyond its borders. Unwearied 
in activity, unexcelled in pulpit power, unfailing in 
sympathetic helpfulness, what wonder that demands 
crowded upon him from every side ? To the limit 
of his strength, and beyond, he met them. So 
abounding in Hfe he was, so seemingly exhaust- 
less the fountain of his sei*vice, that the shock was 
indescribable when it was told that his voice would 
be heard no more ; that the Master of Life had 
called him home. 

Doctor Pattison's students for the past twenty 
years will never cease to be grateful to him for the 
service which he rendered to them in the classroom. 
As a teacher he was educative, inspiring, unique. 
His lecture courses might follow the same lines 
year by year — the lectures themselves were never 
the same. They grew as he grew. Into them he 
constantly wove the choicest garnerings of his per- 
ennially acquisitive mind. Literature, history, cur- 
rent events, every realm he laid under contribution, 



VI INTRODUCTION 

the wide reaches of the word of God most of 
all. To him the Bible was the center of all lit- 
erature and of all history; around it he grouped 
his wealth of illustrative material, and he taught us 
to do the same. To him the center of the Bible 
was the radiant figure of the Christ, whose he was 
and whom he served. 

What a teacher he was ! Instruction, appeal, 
frank criticism, kindly advice, pathos, humor, all 
were there ; sympathy for his students in every 
trial, every problem — a sympathy which in their 
after years followed them even to the ends of the 
earth ; enthusiasm for the great work of the min- 
istry and for its matchless opportunities ; reverence 
toward the great Teacher ; the power which we 
knew he himself had to do what he held up as the 
ideal for others to seek — all the qualities of a great 
and successful teacher he possessed. 

And what a preacher he was \ Texts seemed 
fairly to fall into their rightful divisions. His ser- 
mons were logical, but with that logic which took 
picturesque form, riveting attention and interest. 
His illustrations were jewels which glowed and 
sparkled. The clear-cut, classical face, the kindly 
eye, the persuasive voice, the appropriateness, dig- 
nity, and grace of manner, no one who has heard 
and seen him in the pulpit can ever forget. The 
sermons of this volume will lack the throbbing 
touch of his personal presence, but even for those 
who have never heard him something of the power 
of the great preacher is in them still. 

With us who knew him best, two pictures of 
Doctor Pattison will ever linger most enduring and 



INTRODUCTION Vll 

sweetest of all. One is the hour in the seminary 
chapel, when he led the daily service. The classroom 
work for the day is over, and the students gather 
in the place which has come to mean so much to 
them. Scripture, hymn, and prayer under his 
leadership make a harmonious whole. His reading 
of the Scripture passage is an illuminative inter- 
pretation. His prayer bears the students, all their 
interests, their hopes, their fears, their trials, before 
the throne. The homes from which they come, 
fathers and mothers far away are remembered in 
the wide sweep, the inclusive tenderness of the pe- 
tition. The alumni of the seminary, in city or 
country, in home or foreign field, in joy or sorrow, 
may know that they are not forgotten as the river 
of that prayer flows on in beauty and majesty. 
When it is done, in the shining glory of the after- 
noon sun through the chapel window, the men go 
quietly out, their hearts refreshed and strengthened 
for the work of another day. 

The other is the hour of family prayer, after the 
evening meal in that home which was ever open in 
genuine welcome, in never-failing and gracious hos- 
pitality. We shall not know until the books are 
opened how many lives have been kept from fall- 
ing, how many lives have grown into high endeavor 
and noble service, through the holy influence of that 
hour. He was the priest at his own family altar, and 
all in the home, though but for the hour, were of the 
family circle. We miss him sorely. Those who 
have dwelt in that home miss him most of all. 

Clarence A. Barbour. 

March lo, 1905. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 



PAGE 



I. The South Wind 9 

II. True Reverence 21 

III. 'He Went Away Sorrowful** 35 

IV. Overcoming and Inheriting 47 

V. The Character and Motive of the Chris- 
tian Life ^o 

VI. Counsel and Work 73 

Vll. The Naturalness of Prayer 87 

VIII. For to Me to Live is Christ loi 

IX. The Man Who Never Grew Old .... 115 

X. The Proportions of a True Life .... 127 

XI. The Response of the Bible to Our Intel- 
lectual Nature 139 

XII. The Voice Behind Thee 153 

XIII. Obedience the Solvent of Doubt .... 167 

XIV. Pure and Undefiled Religion 181 

XV. Bread Cast Upon THE Waters 195 

XVI. The Sentinel Peace 209 

XVII. The Waters of the Well of Bethlehem . 221 

XVIII. The Passing and the Permanent .... 233 

XIX. Successful Christian Service 247 

XX. The Sympathy and Succor of Christ . . 259 

XXI. Some Unfinished Things 275 

viii 



THE SOUTH WIND 



When the south wind blew softly. 



THE SOUTH WIND 

On board the ship of Alexandria sailing into 
Italy there was a serious conflict of opinion. The 
lateness of the season, and the state of the weather, 
made it almost certain to the officers that they 
must winter in Crete. With much difficulty they 
had reached Fair Havens, a lonely and inconvenient 
harbor. A few hours' sailing, with a favorable 
wind, would bring them to the much more desira- 
ble shelter of Phenice. Already navigation was 
dangerous ; and yet might they might not venture 
forth in the hope of reaching this pleasanter and 
safer harbor? JuHus, the Roman centurion, in 
charge of a band of prisoners bound for the im- 
perial city, called a council. The captain and the 
ship owner advised to run all risk, and to try 
to attain the better anchorage. They were ex- 
perts and had a right to be heard ; and they spoke 
with the earnestness of personal interest and with 
the authority of ownership. Almost alone, on the 
other side, was Paul the prisoner. He advised 
that they should stay where they were. He was, 
it is true, only a prisoner, but already he had given 

II 



12 THE SOUTH WIND 

promise of that remarkable ascendency over men 
which was one of his distinguishing qualities. Nor 
was he ignorant of the sea ; although his feeling 
toward it was no doubt that of the Hebrew who 
saw on its troubled waters only sorrow and unrest. 
But we cannot wonder that in a matter in which 
professional skill and the stake of personal property 
were concerned " the centurion beheved the mas- 
ter and the owner of the ship more than those 
things which were spoken by Paul." 

And yet although the more part advised to de- 
part thence, there they might have remained laid 
up all the winter in the incommodious harbor had 
not the wind, which hitherto had blown steadily from 
the northwest, suddenly veered about. "The south 
wind blew softly." A smile of satisfaction came 
on the faces of owner and captain, the anchor was 
weighed, the great mainsail was hoisted, and the 
crew put out to sea in the expectation of only a few 
hours' run to the hospitable harbor of their hopes. 

Scarcely two weeks after this Paul stood on the 
deck of that same vessel, now driving before the 
fury of the tempest, and to the starving, sleepless 
crowd gathered about him he said, '' Sirs, ye should 
have hearkened unto me, and not have loosed from 
Crete, and to have gained this harm and loss." 
Two weeks beneath a sunless and starless sky, in a 
ship from which cargo and tackling has been flung 
into the sea, and which even as he spoke scudded 



THE SOUTH WIND 1 3 

before the pitiless storm as helpless as a leaf before 
the wind. And all this harm and loss because 
"the south wind blew softly." 

I. We may learn from this brief record, taken 
from the log-book of a memorable voyage, that it 
is not always safe to listen to the voice of apparent 
superior authority. Without any question that 
superior authority belonged to the experts. The 
captain had come by his position in consequence 
of his skill in seamanship. He was a professional 
navigator ; Paul was not. The one followed the 
sea as his vocation ; the other never willingly put 
to sea at all. But it is probable that Paul, to an 
extent far greater than the captain, had what in an 
emergency counts for more than the skill of the 
schools. He had experience. He could say, 
•* Thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I 
have floated in the deep." This is, after all, the 
highest science. How often has it been seen that 
in all departments of life the mere schoolman has 
had to stand aside, that the man who knew from 
personal experience might be heard. The priest is 
less than the prophet. The unlearned and ignorant 
apostles baffle the scribes and Pharisees. The 
crowned king of England falls before the rough- 
hewn Oliver Cromwell. The unbattled host of 
Massachusetts farmers holds Great Britain at bay ; 
and in our own time the naval experts of Europe 
stood amazed before the splendid genius of Santiago. 



14 THE SOUTH WIND 

Such experience in the case before us, would 
naturally counsel caution. The harbor of Fair 
Havens was indeed incommodious ; and yet here 
we are, and is it not better to bear the ills we have 
than flee to others that we know not of? The 
south wind does indeed blow softly ; but there are 
other winds in store for us, which are neither sooth- 
ing nor soft. Not long has the ship loosed from 
Fair Havens before " there arose against it a tem- 
pestuous wind called Euroclydon." The child of 
the south wind may be the storm. 

Such experience teaches patience. The main 
thought with the captain was to reach his destina- 
tion, where the owner was to deliver his freight to 
the merchants, where the centurion was to hand 
his prisoners over to the authorities in Rome. And 
yet Paul's counsels of patience may win these de- 
sired ends quicker than the breath of the soft but 
fickle south wind. Pitt, the British prime minister, 
listened on one occasion to a discussion as to the 
qualifications required for the post which he occu- 
pied. One man said "Courage," another said 
** Experience," a third said ** Eloquence." " No," 
said Pitt, owner himself of all these things ; '' the 
one quality for a prime minister is patience." And 
he was right. This is the teaching of Jesus, when 
he says to his disciples, " By your endurance ye 
shall win your lives." Now the voice of the apos- 
tle in this incident was the voice of the highest 



THE SOUTH WIND I 5 

science, for it was the voice of one who by per- 
sonal experience had learned to read the secret 
of the sea. 

2. We may further learn that it is not always 
wise to surrender our own convictions to the deci- 
sion of the majority. "The more part advised to 
depart thence." The "more part" is likely to do 
this. The majority is often in favor of change. 
And certainly they will be influenced by the cen- 
turion who represents authority, and by the owner 
who represents substance, by the captain who 
represents skill. Is this not well ? Yes it is, but 
with this saving clause, that not interest, not 
authority, not skill7 not one or even all of these, 
shall usurp the place of personal conviction. The 
vice of the majority in all time has been a reluc- 
tance to think for itself It is men like Paul who 
. dare to say, " Sirs, I perceive that this voyage will 
be with hurt and much damage." He may in this 
forecast be right or he may be wrong ; but any- 
how he has come to this conclusion as the result 
of original study. We are so much tempted to 
believe that " the voice of the people is the voice 
of God " and that there is something divine in the 
decision of the majority, that it is wholesome for 
us to remember that history is full of the triumphs 
of the minority. " Athanasius against the world," 
as the fierce theologian exclaimed ; and Athana- 
sius conquered. "We are but two," whispered 



1 6 THE SOUTH WIND 

Mohammed's solitary companion as they hid in the 
cavern and waited with bated breath the arrival of 
their foes. " No," answered the prophet, **we are 
three ; for God is on our side." '' Here I stand," 
said Luther in the hour of his trial, " I can do 
naught else ; God help me." It is only a calm 
historical assertion that Calvary is the perpetual 
monument to the potency of the minority. At 
that hour, under the blackened heaven above a 
blaspheming earth, Jesus was alone. 

Our point is not complete unless we add that, 
be he right in his conclusions or be he wrong in 
them, the man who thinks for himself as he looks 
out over the sea of life and prepares to make his 
voyage, is acting well his part. He may fail as the 
world counts failure, but he shall even in that case 
discover how much high failure transcends the 
bounds of low success. " If he be the King of 
Israel," shouted the chief priests and scribes as 
they jeered around the cross of Christ, " let him 
come down from the cross, and we will believe." 
But to come down, in that instance, would have 
been to surrender the distinctive glory of his mis- 
sion. *' The Son of man is come to seek and to 
save that which is lost." " I, if I be lifted up from 
the earth will draw all men unto me." I ought also 
to notice that while Paul gave his opinion and 
uttered his protest, he made no further trouble. 
He held his peace and waited. A man does not 



THE SOUTH WIND 1 7 

surrender his convictions because he is not always 
clamorous about them. The end is not yet ; and 
he can bide his time. 

3. We learn, once more, from this incident that 
it is not always well to yield ourselves to the 
south wind blowing softly. On the contrary, there 
are many times when it is far better to remain in 
Fair Havens. 

Let it be granted that " the harbor was not com- 
modious to winter in." It was not, we understand, 
dangerous. The long and perilous months before 
them the crew could pass there in comparative 
safety. But it was obscure and lonely to become 
the home of nearly three hundred people. Those 
who make convenience the first rule of life have no 
good words to speak for Fair Havens. True, it is 
a place in which life and lading are secure. But it 
is not beautiful, it is not attractive, it is not even in 
the currents of life. Its nearest neighbor is an 
obscure town called Lasaea. It has always been 
the fashion to pity the occupants of this incom- 
modious harbor. The narrow means, the hard 
struggle to live, the humble home, the unbeautiful 
daily course ! Much compassion has been wasted 
over all these — wasted, I say, because there is worse 
weariness than they represent, and there is far 
greater peril elsewhere to the true life. In his last 
conversations Mr. Gladstone more than once 
turned his thoughts to this country, and the danger 



1 8 THE SOUTH WIND 

ahead which he saw was not our poverty but rather 
our wealth. We are certainly ungrateful to the 
incommodious harbor if we overlook or forget how 
much humanity owes to it. How its very incon- 
venience has quickened our faculties, so that the 
children of Plymouth Rock and of the bleak New 
England coast have become the foremost inventors 
in the world. The very opposition which that un- 
beautiful harbor typifies has made us what we are. 
God educates us amidst harsh and ungenial circum- 
stances. The leading nations to-day are not those 
that set sail from ports of pleasure under blue skies 
and amid the lapping waves of southern skies. 

Granted also that at the very moment which 
seemed so opportune the south wind blew softly. 
It proved in the end their worst enemy. True, it 
quickened their imagination. This is what the 
south wind naturally does, and it does little more. 

You might think that under its spell the world's 
greatest poetry has been sung. But the poet, like 
the nightingale, has often sung sweetest when his 
breast has been pressed against the thorn. Exile 
and the chill breath of cold ingratitude gave to 
Dante his message ; and the gray skies of England, 
strangers to much golden sunshine, arched over 
Shakespeare as he sang. 

True also, it pleased the taste. It came from 
the tropics, with velvet, balmy sweetness. It 
was the wind of luxury. The south wind blowing 



THE SOUTti WIND 1 9 

softly has it annals as well as the bracing north- 
wester of which these mariners wxre so weary. It 
has blown in the life of the nation, and under its 
spell Rome has lost its sinew, and Spain to-day 
sees herself stripped of her jewels. Again and 
again it has taken out the very heart of a brave 
people. It has blown in the history of our homes. 
The wreckage of perilous wealth is more tragic 
than the wreckage of pinching poverty. It has 
found its way and its welcome in many a young 
life of fair, bright promise, and under its siren sway 
the manhood, the womanhood has succumbed to 
mere self-indulgence. There are graves known to 
us all, I fear, on which this one sentence might be 
written, and it would tell all the story of a wasted 
life — "The south wind blew softly." 

It has blown in the annals of the Christian 
church, and the church has failed to do its ap- 
pointed work. Not poverty but riches is it against 
which Jesus speaks his words of warning, and that 
because not poverty but riches threatens most seri- 
ously our fidelity to the kingdom of heaven. The 
pope of that time pointed to the treasures being 
blown into his palace of the Vatican, and he said 
to St. Thomas Aquinas, ''You see the day is past 
when the church can say, * Silver and gold have I 
none.'" '*Yes, holy father," was the reply, ''and 
the day is also past when to the paralytic she can 
say, 'Take up thy bed and walk.' " 



56 THE SOUTH WIND 

This word of warning is warranted by the fact 
that the course of the captain and owner in loosing 
from the incommodious haven seemed so reason- 
able. There is always much to be said in favor of 
the south wind when it blows softly. " My God," 
a bhnd preacher of our own time, a man of rare 
genius and spirit, says in one of his prayers, " My 
God, I have never thanked thee for my thorn, I 
have thanked thee a thousand times for my roses, 
but not once for my thorn. Thou divine love, 
whose human path has been perfected through suf- 
fering, teach me the glory of my cross, teach me 
the value of my thorn." We cannot be wrong if 
we learn to make that prayer our own whichever 
wind fills our sails to-day. 



II 

TRUE REVERENCE 



And he said, Draw not nigh hither ; put off thy shoes 
from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is 
holy ground. 

— Exodus j» .• J. 



II 

TRUE REVERENCE 

The chapter from which these words are taken 
is full of remarkable contrasts with that which pre- 
cedes it. In both indeed the central figure is the 
same. But with this one particular all resemblance 
between the two seems to cease. Moses the prince 
in the first is Moses the peasant in the second of 
the chapters. The son of Pharaoh's daughter be- 
comes the son-in-law of an Arab shepherd chief- 
tain. The schools of Egypt are exchanged for the 
solitudes of the desert ; the palace vanishes, and in 
its stead we behold the granite peaks of Sinai. 

When his banishment from the populous city, 
the highly civilized peoples, the luxury and the 
splendor of the Egyptian court had continued for 
forty years, it would be natural to conclude that 
Moses is finally and forever laid on one side. 
He has played his little part on the stage of life 
and may now be forgotten. The meteor which 
burned so brightly has vanished, as many another 
before and since, into the gloom. This, however, 
was very far from being the case. The school 
of God has often trained its aptest scholars in the 

23 



24 TRUE REVERENCE 

wilderness. Instead of being buried in an unknown 
desert grave, Moses is about to rise to a newness 
of life. The hour has come for him to emerge 
from the gloom, and once more — and now more 
illustriously than ever before — to act his great part 
on that theatre of the world in which heaven and 
earth, the present and the future, are the interested 
spectators. Whatever he himself may have be- 
lieved, he was not retreating when for nearly a cen- 
tury he wandered in the desert ; any more than 
the wave retreats when by its refluent sweep it 
gathers force and fullness with which once again to 
thunder on the shore. 

From this first vision of God the man who was 
destined to be the leader and lawgiver of Israel 
learned very much ; but I will ask your attention 
now to one only of these initial truths here revealed 
to him. I mean the nature and claims of reverence ; 
and I choose it for the subject of our thought be- 
cause it is of perpetual interest and moment. We 
as much as Moses need to learn what true rever- 
ence is. Notice then : 

I. That this feeling of reverence was wakened in 
Moses by the warning which he now received. The 
warning may be said to have been two-fold. He was 
cautioned against the spirit which he was cherishing, 
and against the state into which he was sinking. 

Think of the spirit which Moses was cherishing. 
Of the forty years which he has now spent as a 



TRUE REVERENCE 2 5 

shepherd we have no record. It is natural for us 
to picture him as a learner, a conscious learner, in 
the great school of solitude and silence where he 
wandered. No wonder that with our conception, 
drawn from the restless and eager age in which we 
live, we should say that doubtless Moses was here 
to solve the problems which had oppressed him 
as a boy and a young man in Egypt ; that here as 
never before 

He saw through life and death, through good and ill ; 
He saw through his own soul. 

As a matter of fact, however, we are told noth- 
ing about this third part of his life which Moses 
passed in these mountainous ranges ; and when we 
listen to his words in this chapter, they suggest that 
the scholar had almost everything yet to learn. 
Apparently his religious hopes, and the veiy faith 
from which they sprang, had well-nigh died out. 
He was falling into a condition not so much raised 
above the flock which he tended. ** Look out for a 
people," says Hume, '* entirely destitute of religion. 
If you find them at all, be assured that they are but 
a few degrees removed from brutes." Moses was 
indeed far from this forlorn condition as yet, but 
he seems almost to have been on his way to it. 
From it he is rescued at once by a marvelous 
natural phenomenon. "A flame of fire in the 
midst of a bush, and behold, the bush burned," etc. 



26 TRUE REVERENCE 

An unwonted feeling, one which for years had been 
a stranger to his breast, was roused ; the feehng of 
curiosity: **And Moses said," etc. But curiosity 
in its turn was also perilous. It is only worthy of 
commendation when it becomes a gateway through 
which one passes to reverence ; and so the feeling 
was checked at the moment when it rose to action, 
by the voice of God calling to him out of the midst 
of the bush, '' Draw not nigh hither ! " 

Think, again, of the state into which Moses was 
in danger of sinking. This is suggested by the 
words which follow. '* Put off thy shoes from off 
thy feet, for the place ... is holy ground. A state of 
quiet hopelessness as to his future led him to a state 
of quiet indifference as to his personal unworthi- 
ness. What was the use served by the sandals ? 
You answer : They guard the bare feet which are 
thrust into them from dust and defilement. What 
would otherwise cling to the foot, now clings to the 
sandal. " With the shoes, there is left behind that 
dust or impurity of earth which is collected in walk- 
ing on earth's ways." Here, then, two truths, so 
closely related that they can never be considered 
apart, were impressed on Moses' mind. I mean 
the sense of his own personal sinfulness, and the 
conviction of God's absolute holiness. No need to 
be shod in that presence, " for the place whereon," 
etc. Walk free and fearless there ! There can 
gather no stain of sin upon the street of the New 



TRUE REVERENCE 2/ 

Jerusalem, and therefore it is " pure gold as it were 
transparent glass." 

2. So on the very threshold of this temple of 
worship and communion ** reared in the mountain 
of God," Moses learned that reverence claimed 
that he be holy because God was holy. The 
first element in reverence is personal sanctification, 
personal holiness. 

That reverence was inspired by the discovery of 
God's presence. '* And the angel of the Lord." 
None other, as we are told afterward, than Jehovah 
himself, "appeared unto him," etc. We remem- 
ber that Moses had been born and trained in Egypt. 
His associations in regard to religion would almost 
inevitably be closely connected with great temples, 
the stateliest and the most splendid structures in 
that stretch of splendid land. His father-in-law is 
indeed called ''the priest of Midian," and possibly 
he was a believer as Melchisedec was, but we read 
nothing of shrine or sanctuary or altar in his house. 
Under these circumstances it was natural that if 
Moses thought about the subject at all, he should 
picture the Most High as dwelling only in temples 
made with hands. From such a narrow conception 
he is now to be forever emancipated. The poor 
stunted bush, the thorny acacia, "so characteristic 
of that barren region that the name Mount Sinai is 
supposed to be derived from it," became luminous 
with the glory of God. We need to learn the 



28 TRUE REVERENCE 

lesson which Moses was now taught, and therefore 
we may well pause over it. 

He discovered that God reveals himself in the 
familiar. How well Moses had come to know this 
desert ! To him it was not historic or heroic, as it 
is to us. It was only the pasturage for his flock. 
Notice that to all appearances Moses was satisfied. 
"And Moses was content to dwell with the man," 
etc. Why not? Had he not all he needed for 
the present? The home and the business, both 
prosperous enough, were his. And further I note 
that this satisfaction was of the most fatal kind, as 
it was satisfaction born of tranquil despair. He 
had no future ; he had no past. Egypt was not 
more of a faded dream to him than was Canaan an 
unsubstantial vision. "Who ami?" he cried to 
God a few moments hence. He has lost reverence 
for himself, the child of such high hopes and glow- 
ing auguries. Ah, yes, for not until we reverence 
God do we reverence ourselves. Now he dis- 
covers, in this sudden burst of divine light, what 
Jacob had discovered long before — what we must 
discover also if we are to discover ourselves — 
"Surely the Lord is in this place ; and I knew it 
not." Here is the immanence of God. But he 
learned further, although in the same line of dis- 
covery, that God's presence may be looked for in 
the commonplace. The bush — commonest object 
in that desert — it was that burned with fire. A 



TRUE REVERENCE 2^ 

" great sight" indeed ! I do not find it so hard to 
believe in a God of glory thundering as I do in a 
God walking amid the trees of the garden in the 
cool of the evening. That the peaks of Sinai, far- 
off, remote, piercing the heavens, should flame with 
the splendor of his advent fire is not so wonderful 
as that he should touch the poor acacia shrub with 
his fiery finger. The supernatural in the natural 
perplexes us. Not " God," but " God manifest 
in the flesh." We are all conscious of this diffi- 
culty. But what does it mean ? Only that sin has 
robbed the familiar forms and objects round about 
us of their true and native dignity. It materializes 
the universe. God' is perpetually rescuing this 
earth of ours (and of his) from the contempt into 
which it has fallen. He teaches Moses that even a 
shepherd's rod can be the mightiest of sceptres, 
and David that even a shepherd's harp can be the 
most melodious of instruments. That rod and that 
harp are now part and parcel of an immortal past. 
History cannot spare the one, devotion with loving 
reverence cherishes the other. 

Now the conclusion from this is most important. 
Our holy land is here ; not in Jerusalem or on 
yonder mountain is God, but rather seated on the 
lowly well-side. '' I that speak unto thee am he." 
Our daily life becomes solemn and yet unspeakably 
beautiful when we grasp the truth. Fellowship 
with God can be enjoyed in the humblest home. 



30 TRUE REVERENCE 

The shop may become a sanctuary. All life is 
transformed and transfigured into a sacrament. 

Where' er we seek thee thou art found, 
And every place is hallowed ground. 

3. This feeling of reverence was deepened and 
confirmed in Moses by the revelation of God's 
nature. 

Two senses were appealed to in this experience 
through which Moses passed, his sight and his 
hearing. 

First, what was it Moses said ? ** He looked, 
and behold," etc. We are no doubt familiar with 
many of the explanations of this phenomenon which 
have been suggested. Fire has by all nations been 
considered a natural symbol of deity ; and that, in 
part because it has also been considered a natural 
symbol of life. Now this was just what Moses most 
sorely needed to learn. He must come to believe 
most firmly in a living God, present and powerful in 
this wilderness. No past or future deity ; but essen- 
tially and intensely present. ''And God said unto 
Moses, Then shalt thou say," etc. So it has been 
said most truly that what the Old Testament insists 
upon above all else is the association of the object 
of our worship with the idea of life. God shall be 
a living God. " My soul thirsts for God, for the 
living God." Is this not the only thing for which 
we still need to be supremely anxious, the presence 



TRUE REVERENCE 3I 

of the living God ? Reverence for the church 
building, for the Christian fellowship of men and 
women, for the individual believer, is most worth- 
less — it is actually dangerous and verges on super- 
stition, unless the bush burns with the presence of 
the living God. That made the holy of holies 
resplendent, that transformed the shore of Galilee 
into a temple, that consecrated the upper chamber 
in Jerusalem as the mightiest of sanctuaries. Is 
this building holy? Yes, if the living God be 
here. Otherwise its colored windows richly lighted, 
its carven timbers, and its goodly stones, are only 
like the jeweled robes which wrap the form of the 
dead monarch. The holy places of earth are many 
of them as humble and unpromising as was this 
bush on Horeb ; but nothing is holy where God is 
not, and where God is there is nothing too lowly 
to enshrine his glory. 

Then think what Moses heard. Oh, he heard 
so much in those great utterances of God that we 
can but glance at some few of the powerful impres- 
sions made on his nature ! Did not he learn God's 
mindfulness ? " Moses, Moses ! " His name, then, 
was not forgotten. Here at his veiy feet the voice 
speaks, and it speaks to him. Brethren, so well 
does God understand us that he calls us by our own 
names. We need not wonder at it, we ought not 
to do so, but yet we do. And then suddenly some 
familiar experience becomes vocal and personal with 



32 TRUE REVERENCE 

our very name, and we discover that not the care 
of all the world can blot us out of the mindfulness 
of our Father in heaven : 

Thou art as much his care as if beside 

Nor men nor angels lived, in heaven or earth. 

Did not he further learn God's transcendent 
glory ? "I am come down." God was in the bush 
but only because he had chosen it as the medium 
through which to reach the shepherd of Horeb. 
He was not the bush. Always and everywhere it 
must be a descent when God comes into range and 
residence with us. 

Yes, and the priceless truth of the Divine per- 
manence he learned also. *' I am the God of thy 
father, the God," etc. He spoke of the patriarchs 
as not many but only one — " thy father." It is 
not only that God abides ever the same ; but it is 
that therefore we, the human family, abide. The 
individual, indeed, passes away, but the race con- 
tinues, as the wave rises and sinks but the ocean is 
always there. I worshiped in Abraham, I pleaded 
in Jacob, I sang with David. I cried for help in 
Peter, I yielded in Paul, I waited patiently in the 
splendor of heavenly vision in Patmos with John. 
God's purpose for the race holds the race together 
as the heart of one man. 

Then over all falls the conviction of God's love. 
"I have surely seen." One catches here, as in so 



TRUE REVERENCE 33 

many other places in the Old Testament, the pre- 
lude of that saving mercy which became incarnate 
in Christ. " I know their sorrows ; I am come down 
to deliver them." The advent was anticipated in 
such words as these. It was under the impressive 
majesty of that first revelation which bade him 
keep off from the place, that we are told " Moses 
hid his face ; for he was afraid to look upon God." 
Curiosity had now given place to dread. But gen- 
uine reverence has nothing in common with either 
of these. So the further revelation, which is so full 
of the divine mindfulness and the divine mercy, if 
it took the sandals from his feet also took the man- 
tle from his shrouded Hps. He spoke to God, as a 
man speaketh to his friend, face to face. 

Brethren, we are far removed from this desert. 
A moment more, and we shall return to the world, 
as the great leader returned once again after his 
forty years' exile to the pomp and splendor of 
Egypt. But let us leave these granite heights, 
which have not ceased since then to glow with the 
dawn and to stand calm and gray under the star- 
light, with this conviction which changed the slum- 
berous shepherd into the heroic man among men. 
God with us ; God in us ; God for us. Of this 
whole world and of each consecrated life in it is 
it forever true. ** The Lord is in his holy temple ; 
let all the earth keep silence before him." 



Ill 

HE WENT AWAY SORROWFUL" 



But when the young man heard that saying, he went 
away sorrowful ; for he had great possessions. 

— Matthew ig : 22. 



Ill 

**HE WENT AWAY SORROWFUL" 

One word, which rises midway in this verse, 
gives not to our text alone but also to the whole 
story a special fascination. This word is ''sorrow- 
ful." Omit it, and while the incident would still 
attract our attention because of the peremptory 
demand which Jesus made that this young man 
should surrender all his substance in order to be- 
come a disciple, yet the intense human interest 
which clothes it now would be lacking. One of the 
old Italian painters represents Solomon as rising at 
the last day, and looking right and left on the part- 
ing multitudes before the judgment throne, as 
though uncertain with which of the two divisions 
his lot would be forever cast, and it is just this 
same doubt which is inspired in our minds by that 
word "sorrowful." Supposing that we had seen 
what was happening without hearing what was said, 
this look on the young man's face would suffice to 
tell us that he had reached one of those critical mo- 
ments which in every human life mean so much. 
Plainly a change has passed over his thought, his 
purposes, his hopes. The evangelist Mark makes 

37 



38 ''HE WENT AWAY SORROWFUL" 

this contrast very vivid when he says, *'he came 
running," and a moment or two after, '' he went 
away grieved." The simple fact that in three of 
the Gospels the story of this rich young man is told 
at length, plainly shows how much it impressed the 
disciples, and to this hour that sorrowful look of 
his continues to haunt the imagination of the world. 
It seems to be material, therefore, that in what has 
to be said we should confine our thoughts to the 
grief which clouded the young man's countenance 
when he fell back into the throng and vanished 
from recorded history. Three things we may no- 
tice about it. It was the sorrow of disappoint- 
ment ; it was the sorrow of discovery ; it was the 
sorrow of disquietude. 

I. It was the sorrow of disappointment. Enough 
is told us about his life up to that hour for us to 
recover many of its details. Darwin met for the 
first time one of his most ardent followers, with 
whom he had already corresponded at length, with 
outstretched hands, a bright smile, and these words 
of welcome : " How glad I am that you are so 
young." The subject of this story has this un- 
speakable advantage. He had not waited long to 
find his vocation, now ripened only under late au- 
tumnal skies. He was a young man with a career 
already well defined. What benefits accrue from 
ancestry and birth he could claim for himself; he 
had enjoyed all that the schools of that day could 



"HE WENT AWAY SORROWFUL 39 

do for him, and he had inherited great possessions, 
with the chances for influencing men which wealth 
brings with it. Already in the government of his 
native place, where Church and State were one, he 
occupied with honor the post of magistrate. All 
these were conspicuous features in his case, but 
there is much more and much better to be told 
yet. He could say, and in no boastful spirit, of 
the second table in the Decalogue, of the com- 
mandments which touch our duty to our fellow- 
men, and are therefore open to the test of practical 
daily scrutiny, ''All these have I observed from 
my youth." There is no evidence that he was 
either self-righteousor self-deceived. He did not 
tremble beneath the thunders and the lightnings of 
Sinai. In an age when religion meant to a greater 
extent than it does with us, a rigid observance of 
statutes rather than a living embodiment of princi- 
ples, this young man could declare with Saul the 
Pharisee, *'As touching the righteousness of the 
law, blameless." 

And yet, and yet, he was filled with a noble dis- 
content. So when the news spread that Jesus of 
Nazareth was to pass that way before long, he 
launched out on a new venture of faith. Already 
he possessed a religion, but what he was in search 
of was a religion that would possess him. The 
tables of the law he had kept indeed, but to his 
warm touch they felt cold and unresponsive. He 



40 "HE WENT AWAY SORROWFUL 

was asking for bread, and all they offered him was 
a stone. It was life, eternal life he yearned for, and 
all too plainly that way eternal life did not lie. So 
in an access of rare and beautiful enthusiasm he 
came running, and as the crowd separated to let 
him pass straight to the place where Jesus paused, 
he fell on his knees before him with the cry, " Good 
Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal 
life?" The answer of our Lord touched at once 
the high point of his aspirations. " If thou wilt be 
perfect" — but then as the further words fell on his 
ears, in the clear resonant tones into which no par- 
leying or compromise could be read, his heart and 
his countenance fell. " If thou wilt be perfect, go 
sell that thou hast." Only a moment did it take 
Jesus to utter his answer, but it was a moment 
which lost all count of time, and it dashed the 
young aspirant's hopes baffled and beaten to the 
ground. *' He went away sorrowful ; for he had 
great possessions." 

2. It was the sorrow of discovery. Perhaps there 
w^ere few men of his time and land who could 
claim what he could as regards the moral law, and 
among them the danger would be that having at- 
tained so much they would rest content. Yet to 
the best of men must there not come, then as now, 
moments of dissatisfaction ? " The law having a 
shadow of the good things to come can never make 
perfect." A shadow is but a shadow, and they 



"HE WENT AWAY SORROWFUL 4 1 

who see it in the brightest light see most clearly 
the outline of that by which it is cast. These com- 
mandments which the young man had kept from 
his youth up had each of them, as Jesus showed in 
his teaching, its spiritual side — its broader outlook. 
A man might observe them in the letter and yet 
wholly break them. And sometimes it is with the 
keeper of the law, as it is with one who climbs a 
stairway in some old castle in the dark, feeling the 
firm stones beneath his feet, but conscious of mys- 
terious spaces lying to the right and left. What that 
young ruler claimed — and he did it honestly — was 
that he had treated the world about him fairly and 
well. He had great possessions it was true, not 
money gained in trade, or still less by usury, but 
that which was the supreme blessing of the Old 
Testament, land. And at that hour when the best 
thought of the Jewish race looked for approaching 
victory over Rome, and the recovery before long 
of the country which Jehovah had given to their 
fathers, it was of consequence as never before to 
hold as a true patriot ''great possessions." Un- 
consciously to himself "this earth hunger" had 
mastered him. Not that he was a miser, for if 
the miser is of all men the hardest to reach with 
generous impulses, the young miser is a phenom- 
enon as abnormal as happily it is rare. No ; but 
still for all it meant of affluent influence he loved 
his wealth. 



42 "HE WENT AWAY SORROWFUL 

The claim which Jesus made was intended to Hft 
his glance from the things which were seen and 
temporal in rehgion to the things which were un- 
seen and eternal. It put a new and nobler mean- 
ing into the keeping of the law in which he prided 
himself, and of that new and nobler meaning he 
had now to acknowlege to himself that hitherto he 
had known very little. 

And more than this. The test which Jesus ap- 
plied discovered to the young man, that after all 
there was something which he loved better than he 
loved eternal hfe. He would rather give up life 
for his wealth than give up his wealth for life. The 
thing, I care not what it may be, about which this is 
true in any life is the thing which must peremptorily 
be surrendered. Had not this earnest-hearted in- 
quirer come to ask for life ? Here was the way to 
it. Break yourself of the one bond which is hold- 
ing you back. That it means so much to you 
affects the matter not at all. What shall a man 
give in exchange for his hfe? "Sell that thou 
hast, give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure 
in heaven." Cry, with no whisper of reservation : 

Come ill or well, the cross, the crown, the rainbow or the 

thunder, 
I fling my soul and body down for God to plow them 

under. 

Alas, " he went away." 



"HE WENT AWAY SORROWFUL 43 

3. Yet as he goes we feel as though we must not 
part with him there. I find a gleam of hope in 
our text. His was (let this be our final thought) 
the sorrow of disquietude. He was not angry or 
resentful or scornful, he was grieved. As we 
follow him with our surmises what do we see ? 
How will that sorrow work? I answer, It will 
work in one of two ways. 

Perhaps — this is the first way — he will resolutely 
refuse Jesus. Deep in his heart that sorrow will 
he and the dust will gather over it ; it will be buried 
under deeds and bonds and mortgages. He will 
still keep the law and hold his place of honor on 
the magistrate's bench. Some day, it may be, in 
turning over the records of his former transactions 
he may chance to catch a glimpse of that old buried 
sorrow, and it will strike through him with a sudden 
chill. He had in these intervening years gained 
much, but he had lost that, and no breath of eternal 
hfe had been wafted to him since. Had he any 
comfort now in his "great possessions" ? 

Comfort ! comfort scorned of devils, this is truth the poet 

sings, 
That a sorrow' s crown of sorrows is remembering happier 

things. 

But let us dare to hope that his grieving worked 
otherwise. "He went away," indeed, but by and 
by as the years rolled on he took notice of those 



44 "HE WENT AWAY SORROWFUL 

who had done as he. With whom was he keeping 
company ? Judas went away and sold his Lord for 
thirty pieces of silver ; and so did Herod when he 
set Jesus at naught ; and so did Pilate as he asked 
" What is truth ? " and dared not wait for an answer ; 
and so did Felix, when to Paul and to his own con- 
science he said, ** Go thy way for this time " ; and 
so did Demas when, as the apostle says, •' he forsook 
us, having loved this present world." And all the 
while he would be meeting, bound the other way, 
with eternal hfe flashing its foregleams on their 
faces, "the men of whom the world was not worthy." 
Would not better counsels prevail, and although late, 
would he not make the great surrender, who earlier 
in a tragic hour had made the great refusal ? We 
cannot tell, but we can hope. The love of Jesus 
would not then have been lavished in vain, and as 
the words came up to heaven, *' I will arise and go 
to my Father, and say. Father I have sinned," the 
Saviour would, although it might be at the eleventh 
hour, see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied. 
Carlyle speaks somewhere of that gift of life 
"which a man can have but once, for he waited a 
whole eternity to be born, and now has a whole 
eternity waiting to see what he will do when born." 
For all we know to the contrary this supreme 
moment came once only to this young ruler, and 
he could not say with Paul, " I was not disobedi- 
ent to the heavenly vision." The recent "Life of 



"HE WENT AWAY SORROWFUL** 45 

Tennyson " has revealed to us the case of a young 
man who, convinced that within him stirred the gift 
of song which God had bidden him use, went on his 
resolute way, with poverty, hardship, hope deferred, 
and a hundred forms of self-denial, bravely true to 
himself and to his call. And in the end he had his 
reward. In one or another form this necessity to 
decide for or against the heavenly vision comes to 
us all. And the tragic truth is that we must make 
our choice for ourselves. Jesus may love the 
young man, but not even that can take the place 
of the young man's loving him. About this let there 
be no mistake. The religion of Jesus does demand 
self-surrender and self-sacrifice. Neither here nor 
elsewhere is it otherwise set forth. 



IV 

OVERCOMING AND INHERITING 



He that overcometh shall inherit all things. 

— Revelation 21 



IV 

OVERCOMING AND INHERITING 

It was with blood drawn from his own right arm 
that the old Scottish Covenanter signed the con- 
fession of his faith. To-day, in some carefully pre- 
served documents, such names can yet be traced, 
but now the writing is faded and pale. Very faintly 
does it perpetuate the living autograph of which it is 
only the ghost and shadow. So is it with our text. 
What if we could have seen John write these words ! 
It was said of Whitefield, the famous preacher, that 
to hear him pronounce certain favorite words was 
better than any sermon. Was there an eloquence 
of emphasis in John's tones as he repeated our text 
and lingered over the precious truth it carried to 
his heart? "He that overcometh." 

I propose that we think of it in this personal 
light. The means may justify such a course. 
First, the circumstances of the apostle when he 
wrote them. A prisoner ; " in the isle that is called 
Patmos for the word of God, and for the testimony 
of Jesus Christ," he was a prisoner of hope. 
In his thought the certainty of deliverance and 
of triumph was always prominent. This word 

D 49 



50 OVERCOMING AND INHERITING 

*' overcometh," which is almost exclusively his, he 
may have learned from his Master, for it is John 
who received the declaration of Jesus, "I have over- 
come the world." However that may have been, 
it is certain that it was a favorite word with John. 
He uses it at least six times in his letters and 
twelve times in this book. This suggests that 
above the darkness of the exile on Patmos gleamed 
the assurance of approaching victory. 

Then, again, I think that there was personal em- 
phasis in the word ''overcometh " as John spoke 
it, because of his own character. He had some- 
thing to conquer before he could hope to inherit. 
Now what was that? Without going any further 
than the fact that our text was written by John, 
the companion of Jesus, the disciple whom he 
loved, the one who lingered latest upon the battle- 
field, let us simply think of these words as a bit of 
his personal history. He bathed them in his own 
experience. The light which poured from them 
reached him by way of the familiar window of his 
own life, and it was all colored and changed by that. 
What was it, let us ask, that John had to overcome ? 
What was it that John hoped to inherit ? 

I. He overcame his natural love for his voca- 
tion. He was a Galilean fisherman, as was his 
brother James. So also was his father before him, 
and probably for generations this had been the 
occupation of the family. There are evidences 



OVERCOMING AND INHERITING 51 

that they had hired servants, and the mother of 
the family had certainly substance with which she 
in after years ministered to Jesus. This John left 
at the bidding of Christ. Twice that call was re- 
peated before it was finally obeyed, and perhaps 
this points to a struggle and a conflict. Does it 
seem to you to be a slight matter this ? I have 
seen the Irish emigrant lean forward over the bul- 
warks of the vessel as the land of his birth faded 
from his eyes forever, and tears were streaming 
from his eyes that told a very different tale. He 
was leaving poverty, rags, and wretchedness. The 
heir of centuries of wrong, the light died out upon 
a ruined hovel and barn and barren hillside — but 
it was home ! Here, in this country, was compe- 
tency, comfort, a sure livelihood, and an inheritance 
to pass on to the next generation. Christ came to 
John, as it might be to you, the clerk, the mechanic, 
the man of business, and he said, " Follow me." 
And he immediately left the ship and his father 
and followed Jesus. There was something over- 
come in that. 

2. He overcame his preconceived ideal of what 
the national deliverer should be. It was the 
preaching of John the Baptist that first attracted 
the young fisherman of Bethsaida. In common 
with a throng from all parts of the country, he 
found himself in the wilderness of Judea, listening 
to the fearless witness for God and the truth who 



i2 OVERCOMING AND INHERITING 

was there, as he said, to prepare the way of the 
Lord. Into the inner circle of John's chosen dis- 
ciples he was drawn. But John the Baptist was 
only "a voice." He was like the courier who, in 
the Eastern lands, runs before the sovereign to 
clear his path, to proclaim his title. Gaunt and 
sinewy, his very figure as well as his dress sug- 
gested this. Far other would it be with the Mes- 
siah himself when he should come ! The hot and 
dusty herald, lightly clad, fleet of foot, and rough 
in outward appearance, was not less like the great 
sovereign whose forerunner he was than was John 
unlike his King. So men thought. 

One day, however, John the Baptist was standing 
by the Jordan with our fisherman, now his ardent 
disciple, and pointing to a young man, one just like 
themselves, said, "Behold the Lamb of God." It 
needed that this startling sentence should be re- 
peated once more, the next day, before John could 
grasp the truth. "Verily he took not on him the 
nature of angels, but he took on him the seed of 
Abraham." God has no nobler casket into which 
to put the jewel of redemption than our flesh, the 
body which he himself has fearfully and wonderfully 
made. But to believe this was, to such an one as 
John, not easy. He had listened to the reading of 
the prophets, he had drunk in the splendor of the 
national faith in a coming Messiah, he had caught, 
now and again, an ecstatic glimpse of what the Son 



OVERCOMING AND INHERITING 53 

of God, the King of Israel, should be. Now he is 
bidden believe that his own countryman, a man in 
all respects such as he is, is the Hope of the world. 
He does believe it, but it means again a struggle 
before he finally overcomes. 

3. He overcame his passionate nature. You 
may know that modesty was one characteristic of 
John. He never mentions his own name. He 
calls himself ''that other disciple," or ''the disciple 
whom Jesus loved." As a consequence of this 
reticence we have a popular conception of John 
which I beheve to be totally wrong. He is pic- 
tured as womanly, with smooth face, as tender and 
soft and yielding. All this, in the main, because 
he speaks so little of himself and because he was 
specially loved by Jesus. But how mistaken this 
is ! The man who is always talking of himself, in 
the prayer meeting, in the pulpit, in the home, is 
weak, he is not strong. Men talk of themselves in 
the inverse ratio of their worth. The Pharisee has 
told us far more of his personal history than John 
has. And if Jesus loved John it was not because 
he was soft and yielding, but because he was deep 
and quick and broad. It was this man that Jesus 
named a son of thunder ; it was this man who for- 
bade the man to cast out devils in his Master's 
name ''because he followeth not with us" ; it was 
this man who wished to call down fire from heaven 
to consume a village of the Samaritans because the 



54 OVERCOMING AND INHERITING 

people there would not welcome his Master. This, 
however, is the last recorded outburst of unbridled 
passion. It was the final upleaping of a flame 
which, henceforth consecrated to Christ, made the 
disciple's whole nature to glow with a sacred fervor 
and a pure passion. But let any one who is quick 
and impetuous say whether it is an easy thing to 
conquer and control self. This John did, and it 
meant overcoming. 

4. He overcame his personal ambition. One 
day he and James, with their mother, came to 
Jesus, worshiping him, and desiring that in the 
coming kingdom of God these two sons might be 
seated the one on the right hand and the other on 
the left hand of the Lord. It was a daring request 
and it spoke a daring nature. Not for nothing 
had John wandered on that Galilean beach ''nour- 
ishing a youth subhme" ! Not for nothing had he 
climbed with Jesus the mount of Transfiguration 
and heard Moses and Elijah talk with his Master 
of his approaching death and of the glory that 
should follow. Because he speaks so little of self 
do not be deceived. It is the still river that runs 
deep. With nothing short of a throne beside his 
Lord in his coming reign will John be content. 
Now he has come to be an old man. One by one 
his friends have crossed the river and he lingers 
yet on the shore. The gates opened first for his 
own brother James ; Peter, his closest companion, 



OVERCOMING AND INHERITING 55 

has gone in too. On this barren strand he stands 
alone, a relic of a past age, but he is content. No 
longer snatching at the highest place, I hear him 
whisper, ** It doth not yet appear." 

He overcame his natural love for the home in 
Bethsaida and for the fishing boat on Gahlee ; he 
overcame his own splendid vision of the Messiah ; 
he overcame his impulsive and passionate disposi- 
tion ; he overcame his early ambition. 

This overcoming was not all. Upon that foun- 
dation let me build up the noble truth of the text, 
he "shall inherit all things." Without pausing to 
explain at greater length the full meaning of this 
inheritance, which really points to the new heaven 
and the new earth, we will still keep to the per- 
sonal bearing of all this upon John. The truth I 
believe to be this. What man conquers he inher- 
its. If he conquers self he inherits self If he 
conquers circumstances he inherits circumstances. 
Now, think how true this was in John's personal 
experience. He overcame and so he inherited. 

He overcame his natural love for his vocation. 
But what then? "Come after me," said Jesus, 
"and I will make you to be a fisher of men." The 
same thing, my brother, Abraham left his country, 
but he found Canaan ; he left his kindred, but he 
found a posterity numberless as the stars of heaven ; 
he left his father's house, but in him all the fami- 
lies of the earth were blessed. What you give up 



56 OVERCOMING AND INHERITING 

comes back to you, with a divine difference. Not 
to cast the net into the waters of GaHlee, but into 
the great ocean of life ; not a fisher of fishes, but a 
fisher of men. 

He overcame his ideal of an earthly Messiah. 
He inherited the most glorious conception of the 
Son of God and the Son of Man that human heart 
has welcomed to its love. It was upon him that the 
Christ of this book, clothed royally and girt with gold, 
with flaming feet and a voice as the sound of many 
waters, laid his right hand. The poor, baseless vision 
of his boyhood, how worthless it must have seemed 
compared with this divine reality so full of the 
majesty of heaven and the music of its royal voice ! 

He overcame his nature in its passionate impor- 
tunity. Robed as a conqueror he inherited that 
nature. The soil once rent of the volcano is often 
the richest in which to grow the olive and the vine. 
This passionate heart lost none of its fire ; it could 
still flame up when the Son of God was insulted, 
but oh, how it rather glowed with unquenchable 
love for him ! If now and again it flashed its flame 
on the rebellious and the defiant, its true and cher- 
ished mission was just to light men and women to 
the feet of Christ. The crimson on his banner was 
the blood of Jesus Christ. The passion in his tone 
was all thrilling with intense desire to lead his fol- 
lowers to the Advocate who could plead their cause 
and bring them off victorious, 



OVERCOMING AND INHERITING 5/ 

He overcame his ambitions. Rome was never 
conquered. Caesar still reigned. But instead of an 
earthly throne and a temporal triumph, he looked 
away to the new heaven and the new earth and he 
saw his reward there. "To him that overcometh." 

So we have taken this brief text and set it to the 
music of John's own life. It meant everything to 
him. Yes, but what does it mean to us ? It is a 
slight matter that, in this great battle of life, others 
are winning; of little consequence that eighteen 
centuries ago an old and weary man, laden with 
spoils of self- victory, passed up to his inheritance. 
He who has failed to fight, or failed to win, has 
no place in the triumph of this cause. . . My 
brother, you must take these words and plunge 
them into the baptism of your own life. Have 
you overcome ? Have you sacrificed ease and 
substance for Christ ? Have you given up the 
day dream and found the reality ? Have you con- 
quered the easily besetting sin? Have you laid 
aside the personal ambition that came between you 
and a Christian life? Then you shall also inherit. 
Livingstone gave up home for Christ and died in 
Africa. To-day Africa, looking to the Lord, is his 
inheritance. Henry Martyn, the laureled prize 
man of his year in the University of Cambridge, 
turned from that bright vision and buried himself 
in Persia to preach. To-day his name and memory 
have roused hundreds of young men to like sacri- 



58 OVERCOMING AND INHERITING 

fices. John Bunyan met and vanquished the easily 
besetting sin. From the conflict he came an old 
man prematurely wrinkled and worn, but now he 
inherits the land which he pictured so vividly and 
not a trace of trouble rolls across his peaceful 
breast. At the height of his popularity, William 
Wilberforce turned his back on the honors of place 
and power and went forth to champion the cause 
of the slave. He inherits to-day the grateful hom- 
age of millions who, but for him, might be in 
bondage yet. 

"Blessed is he that overcometh." Wave after 
wave breasted and conquered becomes in its time 
a friend and an ally, and lifting the strong swimmer 
on its mighty crest sweeps him nearer to the shore. 



THE CHARACTER AND MOTIVE OF 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 



Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmov- 
able, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch 
as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord. 

— / Corinthians /j / ^8. 



THE CHARACTER AND MOTIVE OF 
THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 

One of the fairest flowers in the Alps blooms on 
the verge of the eternal snow. Around it, like the 
sheeted dead, the great mountains lie, silent and 
motionless, while this one sign of life blossoms 
into a loveliness all the more striking from contrast 
with the gaunt and dreary barrenness which it in- 
vades. So these brave words, bracing our hearts 
afresh for present duty, bloom, like that Alpine 
flower, on the very fringe of death. They con- 
clude a chapter which, more than any other in the 
Bible, Hnks itself in with our saddest and most 
solemn memories. Here, I think, we have one 
proof among many of Paul's surpassing skill in 
generalship. It is said that the true soldier dis- 
plays his genius not so much by winning the vic- 
tory as by following that victoiy up when it is won. 
An inferior commander would have suffered his 
troops to rest upon the great triumph with w^hich 
the chapter draws to a close. After ciying " thanks 
be to God, which giveth us the victory through our 
Lord Jesus Christ," how natural, and how welcome 

6i 



62 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 

sweet repose would have been. But Paul knew 
that the moment of victory is often the most op- 
portune for pushing forward ; and into that one 
connecting word '' therefore" he pressed the whole 
force of the previous argument. The sober strain 
into which the masterly demonstration runs, is like 
the course of the river, deep and strong, below the 
cataract. All the passion of the waters pours itself 
into that narrow channel. Because of all that has 
just been proved, ''therefore," adds the apostle, 
" be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in 
the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that 
your labor is not in vain in the Lord." 

There is one more preliminary observation which 
needs to be made, and it has reference to the 
phrase, "the work of the Lord." We must be- 
ware lest we take an insufficient and partial view 
of the apostle's meaning. By ** the work of the 
Lord," I believe he intended us to understand the 
whole Christian life, active and passive. Life to 
him was a work, an edifice upon which he labored 
continually, and in which his to-days and yester- 
days were "the stones with which he built." Our 
conception of "the work of the Lord," so far as 
we personally are engaged in it, is of something to 
which we turn in moments of leisure or in hours 
of special earnestness. Paul's conception of the 
work of the Lord was that it was " the life which 
he lived in the flesh." Li one of the old convents 



THE CHRISTIAN UFE 63 

of Italy they still show the humble cell where a 
famous painter lived and labored many centuries 
ago, the poor, narrow home to which only the 
brethren of his own order were wont to enter. On 
the walls of that cell he put his finest work, cover- 
nig them with ''luminous frescoes, beautiful beyond 
the power of words to describe." Here, rather 
than in the pictures which went abroad and made 
his name illustrious, he was seen to the best ad- 
vantage, for here it was that his whole life was 
spent. This was indeed himself And was not 
this just the thought upon which our Lord laid 
such emphatic stress, when, in the prospect of the 
cross he said, " I have glorified thee on the earth ; 
I have finished the work which thou gavest me to 
do" ? The work of the Lord was the life of the 
Lord ; and with ourselves, in like manner, the work 
of the Lord is the whole Christian life, lived in the 
spirit and spent in the service of the Master. 

Taking this phrase, then, in its broadest and 
truest sense, we have before us this subject for our 
study, the Character and the Motive of the Chris- 
tian Life, its character suggested in these words, 
** steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the 
work of the Lord," its motive expressed in the con- 
cluding sentence, "forasmuch as ye know that your 
labor is not in vain in the Lord." The character of 
the Christian life, "Be ye steadfast, unmovable, 
always abounding in the work of the Lord." 



64 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 

The two features which are made most promi- 
nent here may seem at first sight to be in violent 
contrast, even if they be not in actual conflict with 
one another. We are wont to think that the 
church of Christ divides itself into two armies, the 
active and the passive ; or, as they are here de- 
scribed, those who are " steadfast and unmovable," 
and those who are " always abounding in the work 
of the Lord." But this division is artificial and false. 
The truly consecrated Christian course is not one 
only, but both of these. It is like the boat which, 
while firmly anchored in the harbor, swings loose 
and free with the tide. He only is really active in 
the work of the Lord who, in the calm and silent 
depths of his nature, is steadfast and unmovable ; and 
he only is really steadfast, whose inmost soul is like 
the axle of the wheel, which while motionless itself, 
is nevertheless the center of motion. 

I. First of all, then, we need to be steadfast and 
unmovable. These two words are not mere echoes 
the one of the other ; but (so far as we can learn), 
in the mind of the apostle each pointed to a dis- 
tinct source of peril to the believer. The exhorta- 
tion to be ** steadfast" was needed because of the 
dangers lurking within the soul of the Corinthian. 
A nature such as his, intensely active, absorbed, 
and interested in the labors of the hour would, all 
too soon, strike deep roots in the present. There 
would be no upward-glancing eye ; no forward- 



THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 65 

hastening foot ; no hand outstretched, even now, 
to touch the goal and grasp the prize which as yet 
were invisible. So, before he was himself aware 
of it, that Corinthian believer would be "moved 
away from the hope of the gospel." We learn here, 
from the order in which this entreaty comes, where 
our most serious peril lies. If we be stablished 
in ourselves, all the onsets of external fires, so far 
from moving us, will only serve to make us still 
more strong in our position ; but if we, Hke the 
Corinthians, have loosened our moorings in the 
deep sea of truth, then we also shall be torn from , 
our anchorage and, like that hopeless vessel in the 
Adriatic which carried Paul toward Rome, shall be 
driven before the wind and "exceedingly tossed 
with the tempest." 

With the word " unmovable " we are led to 
think of foes that are outside the soul of the be- 
liever. How hard it must have been in a city like 
Corinth to keep alive this great faith in the coming/ 
and kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ. No church 
pointed heavenward, no sabbath bells rang out 
upon the tranquil air, no day of worship indeed 
was recognized as distinctly Christian, no graves 
bore inscriptions full of "that blessed hope" ; be- ^ 
yond that glorious blue sky there seemed no 
"heaven of heavens," beyond the glowing sunset 
of to-day no sure and certain daybreak on an 
eternal morrow. 

£ 



66 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 

You see how intense was the strain on the soul 
of these early Christians, first from their own train- 
ing in the desolate hopelessness of heathenism, and 
secondly from the absence of food for bright an- 
ticipations in the world around them. So you can 
appreciate the burning earnestness of this chiefest 
of the apostles, when he took this tender and feeble 
faith and trained it up about his most powerful ar- 
gument, much as the frail vine in the forest clings 
and cHmbs around the sturdy oak. "Therefore, 
my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable." 

2. The second feature in the Christian character 
to which he points is its activity. ** Always abound- 
ing in the work of the Lord." This word " abound- 
ing" was the most expressive word which could 
have been found for the purpose which Paul had in 
view. It means "over and above," "exceeding in 
number and in measure," "more than enough." 
The grace to which the Corinthians were urged was 
not simply continuance. We know how, in the 
fierce competition of trade, the business must not 
merely hold its own ; it must make inroads upon 
the territory around it ; it must be forever devising 
some new departure. It is only in the church of 
Christ that men dare to use the phrase : " As it 
was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be." 
You will search the New Testament in vain for such 
words as these. The fear of the apostle seemed to 
have been that his brethren should dream for one 



THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 6/ 

moment that they had touched perfection. He 
would inspire them with what I might call '' a noble 
discontent." It is said that when Thorwaldsen, | 
the sculptor, had completed his statue of Christ he 
burst into tears. For the first time he found him- 
self satisfied with his work ; and he knew that sat- 
isfaction to be the death-knell to all future growth. 
Henceforth, he declared, his powers would decline. 
But we ? How little need there is for such tears 
with us. How far off yet seems this ideal, which 
towers up before Paul, of a life which, in its wealth 
of consecration rises higher and ever higher, until 
with a holy recklessjiess it brims over, " abounding 
in the work of the Lord." 

Thus, then, welded together into one massive 
whole, we see these two characteristics of the truly 
Christian life. Permanent, inasmuch as it is " stead- 
fast and unmovable," like the everlasting hills ; yet 
progressive, inasmuch as it is "always abounding 
in the work of the Lord," like the rich and exuber- 
ant vintage which clothes the walls with leaf and 
flowers and fruit. 

We pass forward to speak of that which occupies 
the remainder of the work, viz. : 

3. The motive of the Christian life. " Forasmuch 
as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the 
Lord." Is it not remarkable that the grandest ar- 
gument in the New Testament, that which has 
spanned innumerable graves with the rainbow of 



68 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 

hope, that which has Hfted up so many hearts 
crushed under bereavement, that which has, by Its 
mingled pathos and persuasiveness, driven despair 
from so many of its victims, should have been 
written for the sake of a handful of poor Corin- 
thians in danger of slipping back into the heathen- 
ism from which they had only partially been re- 
claimed ? This was indeed '* abounding in the 
work of the Lord." Throughout this whole chap- 
ter we seem to hear, as an unworthy undertone, 
the ignorant and querulous questionings of these 
brethren in Corinth. It was they who suggested 
that there was "no resurrection of the dead." It 
was they who said, '* Let us eat and drink, for to- 
morrow we die." It was they who asked : '' How 
are the dead raised up ? And with what body do 
they come? " 

Paul met this half-concealed and half-active un- 
beHef by an argument for the resurrection which 
was based on historical facts in reference to Christ 
himself, and fortified by analogies from nature, and 
completed by a revelation of the eternal purposes of 
God In the government of his world. " Not In vain, 
beloved brethren," is the conclusion of the whole 
matter, *' not In vain in the Lord Is your labor." 

Let us glance at the sources of instability and rest- 
lessness in the soul. They are two : fear and doubt. 

Fear, in the life haunted by a sense of unfor- 
given sin. There is no force in the moral influence 



THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 69 

which a man exerts so long as he constantly finds 
himself casting this dread shadow of unpardoned 
guilt. T remember once to have seen a rusty chain 
swung from one rock to another, and hung just at 
the height where the advancing billows gathered to 
a crest, so that, as the wave rolled on, it was sud- 
denly cut in twain by the cable, and fell, broken 
and impotent, into the wild waste of waters beneath. 
Such is the life which in its most enthusiastic en- 
deavors is paralyzed by the consciousness, " I am 
unreconciled to God." Now the words of the 
apostle are specially directed to this fear. Death 
is vanquished beca.use sin which is its sting has 
been drawn : "Thanks be to God, which giveth us 
the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 

The second cause of instability and restlessness 
is doubt. " If there be no resurrection of the 
dead, then is Christ not risen ; and if Christ be not 
risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is 
also vain." We have already spoken of the hard 
conditions under which faith in a future struggled in 
that old heathen world. The continuous effort of 
the apostles and of the believers was to beat back 
this darkness which, creeping up on all sides, shut 
in and threatened to quench the hope of immor- 
tality. I say **on all sides" ; and was this not so? 
We have been so long accustomed to the light and 
splendors of the Christian revelation that it is with 
our religious feeling as it is with our position in this 



70 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 

century, we find it hard to realize that men once 
groped along our streets lit by the flickering ray 
of the feeble oil lamp ; that men once steered 
across the tempestuous Atlantic guided only by 
the pale light of the stars ; but harder yet to put 
ourselves in the place of those who were without 
God and without hope in the world. Judaism fal- 
tered and hesitated, as it asked in its despair, 
" Shall the dead praise thee, or any that go down 
into silence ? " Heathenism wrote above the se- 
pulchre in which it had entombed all that was 
most precious, ^^Vale, vale, in ceternum vale.'' 

Life then was like some fair structure, noble in 
design, glorious in detail, but with a crack gaping 
in its foundations. It had no eternal foothold. 
Men had no faith then, as they have no faith now, in 
that philosophical immortality which assures us that 
when we have lived our lives out we shall perish, 
but that which is good and true will attain to per- 
petuity in the sum of human virtue among our de- 
scendants. I can think of nothing much more 
pathetic than the close, often no doubt abrupt 
and premature, of a virtuous, moral life in Corinth 
or Ephesus or Athens. Sometimes, when I have 
looked at a certain famous painting of an old 
English warship, towed slowly and sadly to her 
last dock, there to moulder and perish, I have 
seemed to see the heathen life with its final an- 
ticipations. Drop the anchor and let the master- 



THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 7 1 

piece of God fall to pieces, the spoil and the sport 
of the idle wave. 

Oh, how glorious when, through this dark per- 
plexed air, rang out the Christian confidence : 
"Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become 
the firstfruits of them that slept." Christ had 
brought life and immortality to light in his gospel. 
The aspirations, the prayers, the works of faith, 
the labors of love, of these early centuries were 
caught in the current of immortality ; they were 
endued with the power of an endless life ; they 
were **not in vain in the Lord." 

No, not in vain. The apostle was writing from 
Ephesus. His eye, lifted from his page, his mind, 
pausing in this great argument, would rest upon 
that temple, the pride and boast of the whole world, 
which impressed him so powerfully with '' the 
splendor and the emptiness of the pagan worship 
of that age." As we approach the end of the 
year, how much there is in human endeavor and 
human enterprise and human achievement which 
impresses us in the same way. In the realms of 
politics, of commerce, of art, of mere pleasure, how 
the wintry wind which blows across the piles that 
eager hands have raised sighs " In vain." How 
much is like that magnificent mausoleum, which 
the millionaire raised for his last resting-place, and 
which now awaits the body that cannot be found. 
You pass into the heart of many a human hope and 



72 THE CHRISTIAN LIFE 

many a human effort, only to find that there vanity 
and emptiness are throned supreme. 

But the apostle's teaching, the teaching of this 
Christian faith which we hold so dear, is that 
through whatever changes the believer has to pass, 
whatever — like the snow on the hurrying traveler 
— has to fall, to gather, to melt away, he himself is 
preserved. He lives forever. Dear brethren, shall 
we not pass forward to meet the New Year under 
the mastery of this persuasion the most solemn, 
the most inspiring, the most dignifying of all the 
many confidences which our hearts can cherish? 
No chill wind blowing athwart that narrow chan- 
nel of death shall freeze our high activities into the 
awful calm of a river arrested and petrified into 
the eternal ice. As our "work in the Lord" sails 
between these lofty barriers, it shall be with the 
song of triumphant assurance, '* O death where is 
thy sting ? O grave where is thy victory ? . . Thanks 
be to God which giveth us the victory through our 
Lord Jesus Christ." 

Work on, work on, nor doubt, nor fear, 
From age to age this voice shall cheer ; 
Whate' er may die and be forgot, 
Work done for God, it dieth not. 



VI 
COUNSEL AND WORK 



This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, which is 
wonderful in counsel, and excellent in working. 

\ — Isaiah 28 : 2p. 



VI 

COUNSEL AND WORK 

A THEME the most suggestive and entrancing 
occupied the prophet's mind. He was thinking of 
the exquisite adaptation of means to ends in the 
government of God. This theme had apparently 
been started by a very slight illustration of it. He 
watched the husbandman at his toil, and he marked 
how when he threshed now the fitches, now the 
cummin, now the bread-corn, he chose for his pur- 
pose not the same, but various instruments. He 
suited the implement to the material with which it 
had to work. To do this indicated forethought, 
and that was itself the fruit of past experience. 
"For," saith Isaiah, *'his God doth instruct him to 
discretion, and doth teach him." The power with 
which we think, the power with which we act, are 
alike from God. 

They are but broken lights of thee : 
And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

One step further, and the speaker stood at the 
fountain head. "Through nature he passed up to 
nature's God." The husbandman's brain and the 

75 



"J^ COUNSEL AND WORK 

husbandman's hand are from him. But the maker 
is more than his masterpiece. The creator is more 
than the creature. Such intelHgence and skill as 
the Hebrew farmer showed came from God ; but 
like rays of Hght pouring through a broken and 
clouded crystal, they only faintly shadowed forth 
what he himself was. " He is wonderful in coun- 
sel. He is excellent in working." You will see 
that we have an argument for the existence of God ; 
and that it is an argument which is redeemed from 
the sphere of speculative theology by an applica- 
tion to divine interposition in the matters of eveiy- 
day life. For this reason we are wise to study it 
ourselves ; and in doing so we will first consider, 
and then we will apply the prophet's words. 

I. Consider the arguments of our text. "Great in 
counsel, and mighty in work ! " exclaimed Jeremiah ; 
and so gave expression, in briefest and most strik- 
ing form, to the thought which I have now to en- 
force. What is it that is remarkable here ? Surely 
the combination in one being of the wisdom which 
plans with the power which performs. Well may 
that be called remarkable ! Proverbially the in- 
ventor is a poor man. He labors, and other men 
enter into his labors. " Old men for counsel," says 
an adage with which we are familiar, ** and young 
men for war." The type of mind which sits, like 
Mary, at the Master's feet, is distinct from, very 
often it is in antagonism with, the type of mind 



COUNSEL AND WORK 7/ 

which, Hke Martha, is ''cumbered about much serv- 
ing/' In your famihes some children are already 
developing the studious and thoughtful natures, 
others the active and executive natures. In your 
circle of acquaintances you recall at once the men 
who think but fail to put their thoughts into deeds ; 
and the men who are mere drudges, and cany out 
mechanically the designs and projects of others. 

Because these two natures are so seldom united, 
there is frequently failure where we should look for 
success. Doctor Pressense, the Protestant Church 
historian, has noticed how this happened in the last 
century in England. There came with Wesley, 
Whitefield, Wilberforce, Newton, and others, a 
great awakening to spiritual life. It was intensely 
active. But it was practical only. It was not 
accompanied, as in the earlier Protestant Reforma- 
tion, " by a deep and powerful impetus in the do- 
main of thought." It produced no profound think- 
ers. Consequently it was narrow and bigoted ; and 
when its first fervor had died away, it left a resid- 
uum of narrow and bigoted men. The preaching 
of to-day, in like manner, which insists on work, 
and has no time for meditation, for thought, for 
retirement, carries the sentence of death in itself 
It is using up its vital forces and taking no steps to 
renew them. A perfect nature, or a nature which 
looks toward perfection, must be both " wonderful 
in counsel, and excellent in working." 



yS COUNSEL AND WORK 

The nequality between counsel and working is, 
however, essentially human. Think, now, what are 
its causes. I will mention only a few. 

The first is the uncertainty of human life. It is 
affecting to open Macaulay's "History of England" 
and find him starting to write annals which are to 
reach down to our own times* Affecting, because 
although begun in his prime by the man with the 
most richly stored mind of the nineteenth century, 
and although crowned with such praise as few books 
have ever received and such a fortune as few 
books have ever reaped for their authors, yet it 
remains only a fragment. Death, grimly smiling 
when the ardent historian penned that confident 
sentence, came after a while to sever the connection 
between the fertile brain and the facile fingers. 

Another reason for this inequality I find in the 
changeableness of human opinion. Men weary of 
their plans. The nervous force is exhausted in the 
effort of devising. The bridge is built on paper, 
the enterprise is started, the massive foundation of 
a pier or two is laid, and then the project is aban- 
doned. The swift river rolls along and sings in its 
mockery of human fickleness, " Men may come, 
and men may go, but I flow on forever." 

At other times to will is present with us, but how 
to perform that' which is good we find not Where 
is there a more melancholy study than that which 
is offered in the history of legislation ? I suppose 



COUNSEL AND WORK 79 

that there are laws enough in this State, as in other 
States, to punish every form of crime ; to enforce 
purity, honesty, and justice ; to shut up every 
haunt of evil and to make this city a new Jeru- 
salem and this State a garden of Eden. We do 
not, indeed, enforce them ; but then we compen- 
sate for that failure by making fresh laws. What 
is lacking ? Only the connecting Hnk between de- 
vising and doing. Only **the power behind the 
throne," the mighty flood of practical public opin- 
ion. A city of nearly one hundred thousand 
people should be a committee of the whole to do 
what it has decided ought to be done ; but as it is, 
it is fortunate if it can muster a council of thirteen 
to toil at the thankless and ungracious task of forg- 
ing the missing link between counsel and working. 
I mention as a further cause of failure the ab- 
sence of harmony between our places and our 
materials. One of the grandest conceptions of 
Michael Angelo remains a fragment yet, because 
his block of marble was insufficient for his sketch. 
The world is full of such fragments. Some of us 
have ideas which are too much for our powers of 
execution ; more of us have more machinery than 
steam, more engine than motive power. When 
the whole passionate soul of the ocean puts itself 
into the lips of a billow bursting against the cliff, 
the poet sings, and singing expresses oh, how many 
a longing but vain ambition : 



So COUNSEL AND WORK 

Break, break, break, 

On thy cold gray stones, O sea ! 

And I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me. 

Lastly, there is a great gulf fixed between our 
projects and our performances because of the in- 
evitable effect of growth. Men outgrow their own 
thoughts. You smile at the El Dorado of your 
child — ^you have left that long ago. But so doth 
the young man smile at the boy ; and so doth ma- 
turity smile at youth ; and so doth old age smile 
at maturity. Old man ! you could gratify the ut- 
most longing of fifty years ago if you chose ; but 
you do not choose. "Vanity of vanities ! All is 
vanity." Now I am not saying that we never carry 
out our plans ; but I am saying that we rarely do 
so. We battle against all these hostile influences. 
And you never knew the life that was so entirely 
free from them that it never failed to do what it 
desired. If, then, we can find a Being who rules 
and regulates not this earth alone, but this uni- 
verse ; not this universe only, but others, away in 
infinite space, and in whose government the means 
are always adapted to the end and never fail ; one 
whose design is carried out in its entirety ; one who 
never has to take down any part of his building 
because he was better as an architect than as a 
builder ; one whose works, slowly but surely un- 
folding, reveal his first purpose, then certainly we 



COUNSEL AND WORK 8 1 

find God. "This is the Lord of hosts, wonderful 
in counsel, excellent in working." 

2. I pass on to illustrate and enforce this argu- 
ment. Already I am needing to heed my own 
warning — -I find my text too vast for my sermon ; 
and this must be my excuse for gleaning only a 
few from the teeming illustrations which suggest 
themselves now. 

My first picture, then, shall be taken from crea- 
tion. This world is a thought of God, and that 
thought remains just what it was at the first. Cen- 
turies of experience have not altered his mind one 
whit. In the drift, I cannot say how many thou- 
ands of years old, rude implements are found — the 
first tools made and used by man. This was what 
the primitive man was equal to in handicraft. But 
follow the history, the aims, the achievements of 
the human hand since then. We do not live in 
primitive huts, fight with primitive weapons, wear 
primitive garments ; but that hand is the primitive 
hand. This is the hand of Adam in Eden. This is 
the hand of Noah when he builded the ark. This 
is the hand of Raphael when he painted the Sistine 
Madonna. This is the hand of Fulton when he put 
together the first steam engine. As man has ad- 
vanced in commerce, in art, in science, has there 
been discovered any inability in that hand to come 
abreast of his development ? Never ! But devel- 
opment must be on the line of foresight, else there 



82 COUNSEL AND WORK 

will come a crash. The brain will get ahead of the 
hand. When God created that hand, which for cen- 
turies did nothing better than fashion rude flint im- 
plements, he devised it with mechanism adequate 
and adapted to ply the oar, turn the shuttles, wield 
the pencil, guide the engine, hold in its deft and 
fearless fingers the straining reins of these impetu- 
ous years. This hand also *' cometh forth from the 
Lord of hosts, which is wonderful in counsel, and 
excellent in working." 

My second picture, providence shall furnish. 
Providence is a thought of God. "Are not five 
sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of 
them is forgotten before God?" He has foreseen 
and arranged for the slightest incident in your life. 
The ripest science of to-day smiles at the idea that 
there is any such a thing as chance. There is a 
law of storms. The fall of meteoric stones is as 
much in the line of law as the rise and fall of the 
tides. Every man's life, as a great New England 
preacher put it, is *'a plan of God." Yes, and in 
so far as any life is obedient to that plan is it also 
a performance of God. I cannot make music or 
order out of it. The player in the mighty orches- 
tra is equally perplexed. He is too near the music. 
The painter, toiling up in yonder dome, is also in 
bonds to the position. But come away from the 
orchestra. Listen, as the melody disentangles it- 
self from its prison in cornet and harp string and 



COUNSEL AND WORK 83 

tymbal and comes bounding to meet you like an 
enfranchised slave exultant in its liberty ! Stand 
at a distance ! See how the form grows out of the 
fresco, and every figure steps forth from the can- 
vas instinct with affluent life. Brethren, we are 
yet entangled in this music and we ourselves are 
painting this fresco. Wait ! If it be God's will, 
wait ! Oh, how in the great hereafter the psalm of 
our life shall roll out in its perfectness, and this 
life be revealed from its pictured pages as the 
Lord's doing and marvelous in our eyes ! ** This 
also," we shall cry, *'cometh forth from the Lord of 
hosts, wonderful in counsel, excellent in working." 

I turn to redemption for my last illustration of 
God's wonderful counsel and excellent working. 

The Cross is a thought of God, *' unto the Jews 
a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolish- 
ness." Whence did it come ? I said that this 
hand was in God's mind from the beginning ; but 
more amazing still, so was this Cross. The Lamb 
was "slain before the foundation of the world." 
The mustering forces marched forth from the gates 
of heaven to celebrate the birth of this fair earth ; 
the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of 
God shouted for joy ; day unto day uttered speech, 
and night unto night showed forth knowledge ; the 
sun came forth from his chambers in robes of splen- 
dor rejoicing as a strong man to run a race ; but 
over all floated a banner on which the hand of God 



§4 COUNSEL AND WORK 

had worked a blood-red cross. What did it mean ? 
What? I need not to ask you. This, in the dewy 
daydawn of the world's history was God's thought 
as to sin and its heinousness, as to man and his 
preciousness, as to himself and his mindfulness. 
Perish all else rather than this. Does any one 
here question its ultimate victory? No thought of 
God's ever suffered defeat ; this least of all. Souls 
in this church to-day are whispering, " Of the 
adaptation of creation we know little ; the provi- 
dential guidance of our Father in heaven is a mys- 
tery often sorely perplexing ; but the Cross ! That 
cleansed my sin. That eased my heart. That 
kindled my hope. That anchored my faith. 

Great God of wonders ! all thy ways 
Are worthy of thyself, divine. 

Creation, providence, redemption, they pass as 
though in rapid and inspiring review, and we sing : 

These, as they change, almighty Father, these 
Are but the varied God. 

" This also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, 
wonderful in counsel, excellent in working." 

But every masterpiece implies completion. What 
are these illustrations, after all, but illustrations of 
that which is unfinished yet? When God created 
this earth he had in his thought not it alone, but 
also, and better far, the new earth wherein dwelleth 



COUNSEL AND WORK 85 

righteousness. When God formed this hand, he 
formed it not only for the handicraft of earth, 
but also for the victory of heaven, when it shall wave 
the palm and lift the golden crown and cast it at 
his feet. When God planned this life, he planned 
it as the portico and vestibule of the life beyond ; 
we shall only see how glorious it is when we pass 
within the temple through that beautiful gate. 
When God provided '* the Lamb slain from the 
foundation of the world," it was as the sacrifice for 
human sin indeed, but also as the center of human 
praise, the Lamb in the midst of the throne. 

I pause this morning and let these stammering 
words die away. Other lips take up the strain. 
From the far more exceeding and eternal weight 
of glory beyond and from many who, once worship- 
ing with us here, now wait for us yonder, I hear 
the outburst of rapture as eternity unfolds the hid- 
den meanings and purposes of time — " This also 
Cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, which is won- 
derful in counsel, and excellent in working." 



VII 

THE NATURALNESS OF PRAYER 



But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thine inner 
chamber, and having shut thy door, pray to thy Father 
which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret 
shall recompense thee. 

— Matthew 6 : 6. 



VII 

THE NATURALNESS OF PRAYER 

Have you ever remarked how little Christ said 
about the obligation to pray ? Whether men ought 
to pray or not — a subject about which fierce bat- 
tles have been constantly waged since he came — 
was not a subject that he made at all prominent in 
his teaching. For this there may have been two 
reasons. If prayer is a natural instinct, one which 
can never be completely crushed out of our nature, 
then it is wasted breath which argues about it. As 
well argue about the warmth of the sun or the 
freshness of the mountain air. Then, again, it may 
be that men cannot be reasoned into praying. The 
formal spirit which in loveless obedience to com- 
mand ''says its prayers" is the spirit of a slave not 
of a son ; and the keynote of all true prayer Jesus 
himself struck when he said, "After this manner 
therefore pray. Our Father ." 

The authority for prayer is found in two laws, 
the ordinance of God and the constitution of man. 
God commands it, and we are prompted to it. 
We might almost say that these are not two but 
one — as law is one whether it be written in the 

89 



90 THE NATURALNESS OF PRAYER 

statute books or whether it be Hved out in the con- 
duct. Law finds its utterance in life, as the soul 
of song leaps to expression in the voice of the bird, 
and as the hidden beauty of the flower is made 
manifest in its form and color and fragrance. 

We will start this morning, then, where Christ 
himself touches upon this great subject. The obli- 
gation of prayer is taken for granted. ** Men ought 
always to pray." Our present purpose is to show 
that prayer is in line with our constitution, and our 
theme is the Naturalness of Prayer. There are 
three essential elements in human nature to which 
religion ministers. These are Dependence, Fellow- 
ship, Purpose. We are not supreme but subordi- 
nate. No man is his own master. We are not 
solitary, but created to find communion in the 
highest intercourse. We are not aimless, "dumb 
driven cattle," but are in this world for a distinct 
and noble purpose. These three essential elements 
in human nature are each in its turn dealt with in 
the text, and the naturalness of prayer is found in 
this fact. Prayer is the voice of human depend- 
ence ; prayer is the craving for the most glorious 
fellowship ; prayer is the onward sweep of the wave 
rolling shoreward toward the highest accomplish- 
ment. That it is all this makes prayer as true to 
man as it is true to God. 

I. We will speak first of prayer and Depend- 
ence. "Thou when thou pray est." No definition 



THE NATURALNESS OF PRAYER 9 1 

of prayer is accurate nor is any conception of prayer 
correct which leaves out of sight the fact that it is 
not, nor can it ever be, the language of an equal. 
Prayer is petition, prayer is the voice of the sup- 
pliant, of the subject, of the servitor. Is it untrue 
to our natural constitution in this feature? What 
is our life but a perpetual and ever-broadening dis- 
covery of dependence? So far centuries of dogged 
and persistent conflict have not lifted us up to a 
plane on which we are independent of nature. Our 
slave, is it not also our master? Pascal utters a 
world-wide truth when he says : ** Man is but a 
reed. . . It is no^ necessary that the entire uni- 
verse should arm itself to crush him. A breath 
of air, a drop of water, suffices to kill him." But 
not less true is it that we live in a condition of de- 
pendence upon one another. The child has few 
masters but the man has many. The beggar is not 
in bondage as the ruler is. The farther we travel 
in this journey of life, the higher we climb in its 
mountain ranges of honor and success, the more 
certain it is that we must give hostages to fortune. 
We are dependent upon the parents who bring us 
into the world, upon the family whose faces earliest 
print themselves on our hearts, upon the commu- 
nity in which we live as neighbors, traders, citizens. 
Upon the whole world are we dependent, for every 
man is himself a center, with a radius struck out 
from himself to the first point on which the dawn 



92 THE NATURALNESS OF PRAYER 

glances, to the last over which the setting sun sheds 
its parting light. No man, I care not what his 
natural powers, can cut loose from these multitudi- 
nous moorings and yet retain his manhood. 

Now we rise from these evident truths to the as- 
sertion that this fact of dependence is crowned in 
the consciousness that we are God's creatures, 
the works of his hands, the sheep of his pasture, 
and that in him we live and move and have our 
being. The old legend pictured Abram as wor- 
shiping the star until he saw it fade, and the moon 
until he saw her set, and the sun until he saw him 
go down. Then he cried, ** O my people, I am 
clear of these things. I turn my face to Him who 
hath made the heaven and the earth." Dependent 
upon nature ? Yes, but that is dependence upon 
my inferiors. Dependent upon men about me? 
Yes, but that is dependence upon my equals. I 
claim to submit myself supremely to One higher 
than myself Here comes the work of the divine 
Spirit. There is another mastery than the mastery 
of circumstances, the mastery of self, the mastery 
of the race. '* My soul thirsteth for God, even the 
living God." Then, "The Spirit also helpeth our 
infirmities ... for we know not what we should 
pray for as we ought, but the Spirit itself maketh 
intercession for us with groanings which cannot be 
uttered." Prayer is the response of the soul to this 
element of dependence in its loftiest ranges. 



THE NATURALNESS OF PRAYER 93 

2. We pass on to speak of prayer and the sec- 
ond essential element in human nature : Fellowship. 
" Enter into thine inner chamber, and having shut 
thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret." 
Here are three distinct thoughts. In prayer we 
must shut ourselves in ; we must shut the world 
out ; and we must find God in our retirement. 

The first thought is seclusion. '* Enter into thine 
inner chamber." By no means are we to limit 
these words to the thought of any one place. It is 
the barest formalism that reads here the demand 
for the oratory, the cell, the chamber of prayer. 
No such place had Jesus. Oftener than not, '* cold 
mountains and the midnight air witnessed the fer- 
vor of his prayer." His feet brushed aside the 
dew from the long grass, he greeted the daydawn 
with supplication in some still retreat where the 
sky was the roof, and the meadow the floor, and 
the hillsides the walls, in nature's great cathedral 
of prayer. 

There is deep meaning in the phrase " thine 
inner chamber" if we apply it not to the room but 
to the soul. Just as in the heart of Africa there 
are great forests which have never been pierced by 
the sun ; just as far down in the ocean there are vast 
voiceless deeps stirred by no current, swept by no 
storm, so in each nature there is an inner chamber, 
a chamber of silence and seclusion. But what do 
the most of us know about it ? Believe me, there 



^4 THE NATURALNESS OF PRAYER 

are dark continents nearer home than Africa, yet to 
be explored. So Fenelon says, in words never 
more true than now, " Oh, how rare it is to find a 
soul still enough to hear God speak!" Off the 
thronged highway in the city one can discover very 
close at hand slumberous courts and squares over 
which broods the very spirit of undisturbed restful- 
ness, and so did we but care to do it we can turn 
in upon ourselves, and discover there in our heart 
of hearts an inner chamber, which may either be 
left to fall into dust and decay, or transformed into 
that ** large upper chamber" of which Bunyan 
writes with such inimitable beauty, whose name 
was Peace, whose window opened toward the sun- 
rising and where the weary soul can sleep till break 
of day. 

Then the next thought is exclusion. "Shut thy 
door." "Man's prayers," says Emerson, "are a 
disease of the will." Possibly the philosopher put 
it thus because he felt anxious to believe himself to 
be in a state of robust health. But I recall the 
words now for the sake of what they grant to 
prayer. Prayer, anyhow, has to do with the will. 
Man is never more conscious that he acts as a free 
agent than he is when he prays. Coleridge, cer- 
tainly second to no philosophic spirit of the cen- 
tury, says of prayer that it is " the very highest 
energy of which the human heart is capable, pray- 
ing-, that is. with the total concentration of the 



THE NATURALNESS OF PRAYER 95 

faculties." He was drawing near to his end when 
he spoke of such intense compacted prayer as "the 
last, the greatest achievement, of this Christian 
warfare upon earth" ; and then, bursting into tears, 
he laid his soul at the foot of the mercy seat and 
cried, ''Teach us to pray, O Lord." No "disease 
of the will " drove Lincoln, as he himself has told 
us, in the tremendous crisis through which this 
nation was passing with him at the helm, to take 
refuge in passionate pleading with God. No "dis- 
ease of the will" shut that door, outside the clash 
of weapons, the shrieks of the battlefield, the jarring 
voices of the council chamber, the ring of eager, 
watchful eyes wide as the whole of Christendom, 
and within, only one humble soul in the dust be- 
fore God, where Moses, the patriot of Israel had 
prostrated himself before, and where this Moses of 
the nineteenth century prostrated himself now. Ah, 
my brother, to "shut thy door," to shut the strife 
out, to shut the silence in, is not the disease but it 
is the victory, the crowning victory, of the conse- 
crated human will. 

This seclusion and exclusion are performed for 
the sake of communion. " Pray to thy Father 
which is in secret." Other systems of religion have 
commended this abstraction of the soul from time 
and sense, but it is the distinctive glory of Christi- 
anity that in the heart of this silent region it puts 
not merely a great void, but God ; and this God 



g6 THE NATURALNESS OF PRAYER 

not as the expression of law but as the embodi- 
ment of love. I remember to have seen, rising 
high above the shore on a wild and dangerous 
foreign coast, a figure of the virgin looked for by 
the sailors when they were far out from their 
homes, and called by them *'Our Lady of the Sea." 
Shall we dare to say that when we penetrate the 
stillness of our inner chamber, when we reach the 
place over which the peace that passes understand- 
ing rules and reigns, we find a conception of God 
which is peculiar to that sacred retirement? Here, 
as not elsewhere, is ''Our Father which seeth in 
secret." Now here the second essential element 
in human nature finds its satisfaction. It is not 
enough to be dependent upon God. Made in his 
image and likeness we demand a privilege which 
shall set us far above all the other works of his 
hands. We must have fellowship with him. This, 
prayer secures to us. 

3. Now, briefly, let us think of prayer and the 
third essential element in human nature : I mean 
Purpose. It is sometimes objected to prayer that 
it is useless. To this it might be sufficient answer 
to say that the highest intellects, the warmest 
hearts, the most intensely practical natures can 
scarcely have been laboring under a delusion when 
they made a practice of prayer. They have be- 
lieved that in this act " they moved the hand that 
moves the universe." But aside from this, surely 



THE NATURALNESS OF PRAYER 97 

it would be strange if human nature raised by the 
law of dependence and by the law of fellowship to 
this unsurpassed height were to find that here, for 
the first time, its effort was purposeless ! That 
were as though the child guided by a father's hand 
wandered enchanted amid the flowers of the gar- 
den ; but then lifted high up in that very same 
father's arms found only a stony stare, a lustreless 
eye, a countenance without one gleam of recogni- 
tion. No ! Thy Father "which seeth in secret 
shall recompense thee." You have noticed that 
the Revised version omits, and properly so, the 
word "openly." How, we are driven to ask, came 
that word to be inserted at all? The answer is 
suggestive. No doubt it was put in just there in 
deference to the very general but very erroneous 
feeling that all prayer must have public response 
made to it. A significant addition, we say, for it 
points to a disposition to which all the centuries 
bear melancholy witness, to narrow the scope of 
prayer. "Openly" puts the answers of prayer at 
the mercy of time and of space, it finally closes the 
account with the end of the present dispensation, 
and it makes God the servant of man, bound to 
respond to man's demand in man's way. No ! It 
is enough for us to believe that our Father shall 
recompense us. Here? Perhaps; or likelier still, 
not here but hereafter. In the eyes of man ? It 
may be ; or, still more probable, in the sight of 

G 



98 THE NATURALNESS OF PRAYER 

heaven. With recompense which the world can 
measure and weigh and label ? Yes, or, better far, 
with the recompense which, submitting itself to no 
merely transient and temporary standards, throbs 
with the power of an endless life. 

Now we may rest our case here. Wherever man 
is found he reveals to intelligent study these three 
essential elements. He is not free but dependent. 
He is not isolated but social. He is not aimless 
but made for a great purpose. He who created 
him not in vain has not left these elements, like 
belated travelers in the burning desert, to "wander 
up and down for meat," Hfting lame hands to a 
brazen heaven, and despairing eyes to a vacant 
throne. Prayer is God's provision for an appetite 
which he himself created. In our dependence 
upon the most powerful, in fellowship with the 
most loving, in our harmonious activity with the 
most wise, we pray. Not to do so is not alone im- 
pious, it is also unnatural. Then we conclude that, 
as Thomas Carlyle expressed it, *' prayer is and re- 
mains always a native and deepest impulse of the 
soul of men." It is permanent so long as human 
nature is permanent. 

Is this so, and yet do I speak to one prayerless 
hearer? Such an one is an outlaw. He is run- 
ning counter to nature as well as counter to grace. 
Nowhere in the universe does he find his parallel. 
The constitution with which he is endowed charges 



THE NATURALNESS OF PRAYER 99 

him before high heaven as its worst enemy. A 
prayerless soul, said Augustine, " is a city without 
walls." Over such an one the fragrance of the 
flower, the song of the bird, the rising of the sun, 
the circling of the stars, mourn as over the defiant 
rebel, when led by him they would rejoice to follow 
the guidance of the loyal and loving son. 

But to the praying soul the line of thought 
which we have pursued brings strong consolation. 
In the unfallen man of Eden, in the restored man 
of heaven, we have the complete triumph of the 
three great principles which here struggle for the 
mastery. Nowhere as in that inner chamber do we 
lose sight of the barrier which separates the seen 
and the temporal from the unseen and the eternal. 
Time melts into eternity, and earth fades away be- 
fore the glowing splendors of heaven. My brother, 
have faith in God, as thou goest into thine inner 
chamber. 

If you will keep the incense burning there, 
His glory you shall see, sometime, somewhere. 



t.o?C. 



VIII 
FOR TO ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST 



For to me to live is Christ. 

— Philippians i : 2i. 



VIII 

FOR TO ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST 

In the olden times of chivalry, when the knight 
entered the lists to do battle, his helmet hid his 
features, and he was recognized, if it all, by the 
device blazoned on his shield and by the colors 
that waved on his spear. Himself unknown, he 
was content if only glory could be shed upon the 
cause for which he fought. In the holiest of all 
crusades, and the noblest of all chivalries, the apos- 
tle to the Gentiles hid himself behind the shield 
blazoned with the blood-red cross, and aspired after 
nothing so earnestly as to be lost in him who once 
died thereon. So complete was his own self-abne- 
gation that it became a second and a stronger na- 
ture ; and reading his Epistles now, we can detect 
it in even their slightest turns and in their most 
trivial touches. In the previous verse, for exam- 
ple, Paul expresses his resolve that Christ should 
be magnified in him ; but when we expect him to 
say ** that with all boldness as always so now also I 
may magnify Christ," he says instead " that Christ 
may be magnified in my body." It was not him- 
self but Christ that was the supreme thought, and 

103 



104 FOR TO ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST 

his body, whether in hfe or in death, was no more 
than the stage upon which the glory of his Master 
was to be displayed. Who thinks, when rolling in 
the trough of an angry sea, of the glass in the light- 
house lantern through which the light streams forth 
to warn, to rescue, and to guide ? To this impas- 
sioned self-surrender of Paul's thought, words can 
do but scanty justice. Whether we translate this 
sentence *' To me to live is Christ" ; or, more in- 
tensely still, **To me life is Christ " ; or, with equal 
accuracy, *' I live Christ," we fail to give adequate 
expression to his unreserved absorption of himself 
in his Saviour. But the form most familiar to us 
will answer our present purpose ; which is to speak 
of a passion well worthy of a whole life's devotion. 
Then, and only then, is life worth living, when weV 
can say, " For to me to live is Christ, and to die is 
gain." The Philippians, to whom he was writing, 
knew that this was not the language of rhetoric. 
He spoke words of truth and soberness. Present 
to their minds was the remembrance, of that prison, 
that inner dungeon, those hard stocks. Here was 
a truth which the apostle had practised long before 
he had preached it. In considering it, therefore, as 
a statement which had been tried and demonstrated 
under their eyes, we will set before ourselves Christ, 
as the Stimulus, the Substance, and the End of a 
really consecrated life. " For to me to live is 
Christ." Yes I 



FOR TO ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST IO5 

I. Christ is the true stimulus of life. If we were 
called upon to characterize each of the Epistles by 
some one prominent feature, we should select joy- 
ousness as the special peculiarity of Paul's letter to 
the Philippians. Its motto might be found in its own 
pages : *' Rejoice in the Lord alway : and again I 
say, rejoice." This gladsomeness is itself an effect, 
and flows from the exuberant buoyancy of a nature 
charged and surcharged with life. In its turn this 
life also is itself an effect, and must be attributed to 
one all-sufficient fact, that Christ was in Paul, and 
Paul in Christ. I remember to have seen a river, V 
flowing through a^reat factory where one color was 
being extensively used, and which ran that color. 
Steeped and dyed in it, although it passed into the 
works a crystal stream, it left them a dark purple 
flood. So was it with Paul. All the currents of ^ 
his being set through Christ and caught the glory 
of his presence as the waves will sometimes catch 
the splendor of a setting sun. 

Now, it is a rule which needs to be recalled at 
this point, that the endurance and the victoiy of ^ 
any life will be conditioned by its motive power. 
Incited by the high passion of patriotism a man 
lives for fatherland ; and like General Wolfe when, 
mortally wounded, the shouts of triumph floated 
from the battlefield to his dying ear, he will zxy, 
" I die happy." Starting at this, as perhaps the 
loftiest moral motive in life, we pass down through 



I06 FOR TO ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST 

the various stages of commerce, of study, of pleasure, 
of self-gratification. But what do we find ? When 
Wolsey brings his wearied frame to the abbey, and 
dies of disappointed ambition ; when Pitt, the great- 
est of English statesmen, breathes out a broken heart 
in solitude and desertion ; when in our papers, 
morning after morning, we read of some embittered 
and shattered soul madly rushing on 

To death's mystery, swift to be hurled, 
Anywhere, anywhere out of the world, 

what is it we see ? This : That the stimulus of 
life has faded out, while the life itself remained. 
Like some huge vessel wrecked in midocean, 
abandoned of her crew, rent and dismantled, but 
lordly yet, the plaything of the billow whose sport 
is death, how often a human life becomes paralyzed 
because it first becomes purposeless. Brethren, it 
needs more than pleasure, or commerce, or study, 
yes, or patriotism can give us, to impel our lives 
successfully from the cradle to the grave. Life 
must be more than life, or it is less. "For me," 
said Paul, "life is Christ." You take your life, 1/ 
with all its intricate, its delicate, its marvelous 
mechanism, with possibilities which touch infinitude, 
and powers which throb with immortality, and it 
is as when a manufacturer seeks for water power 
with which to run his mill. Plant that life down ^ 
by the streams of trade, of thought, of enjoyment, 



FOR TO ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST ID/ 

of politics, and, in the majority of cases, life shall 
run awhile with swiftness and with ease. Now and 
again some wheel may stop, now and again the 
machinery may seem to you grander than the mo- 
tive power. Yes, but once — and that for ease — 
the waters shall run lower and lower, and then die 
away ; and that divine thing, your life, shall be like 
the screw of an Atlantic steamer, when, lifted clear 
out of the ocean, the emerald billows gHde away 
from it, and it so fighteth as one that beateth the air. 
Paul planted his life on Christ, and it was as though 
one should plant his mill on Niagara. The mighty 
torrent might sweep and surge with measureless 
force through the works ; at times he would have 
to cry, ''Whether in the body or out of the body I 
cannot tell " — but the impulse would not and could/ 
not fail. His whole being thrilled, as he himself 
declares, with " the power of an endless life.'* 

2. Christ is the true substance of life. The 
height of summer is no time in which to study 
the structure of a forest tree.. Clad in its thick 
robe of foliage, the trunk, the limb, the branch, are 
all hidden. So many a life is lost in its employ- 
ment and occupation. Men remember what it 
was in childhood, before their business covered it 
up ; men think what it will be in old age, when, 
stripped of its activities, the tree shall be ** leafless 
and bare." They distinguish, and rightly, between 
the man and his work ; between the life and the 



I08 FOR TO ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST 

living. Paul, however, in this one daring phrase, 
shows us that with the Christian this distinction 
should not exist. To him life was Christ. Let this 
thought fall into two halves, as it does most naturally, 
and we learn that life is Christ, and Christ is life. 

(i) Life, to the Christian, is Christ. Shall we 
dare say this of anything else than Christ ? I know 
that of the present and temporal occupations of life 
we do not dare ; but brethren, carry the text further. 
A man who should avow, *' My life is meat and 
drink, my life is raiment, my life is buying and 
selling, would be guilty of the crime of degrading 
his manhood. Self-blinded and self-bound, he 
would grind to the Philistine. But he who, a Chris- 
tian, lets any other than Christ be his life, like Sam- 
son again, blind and bound, makes sport in the 
very temple of the idol gods. A Christian man ful- \y 
fills his birthright when he measures his life by a 
creed, or by conduct, or by conformity to church 
practices, or by current morality ? No ! life must > 
be nothing else, nothing^less, than Christ. This was 
doctrinally true of the apostle. Were one to take» 
his hands and feet, and nail them to a cross, that 
would, one fears, be an advance on any sacrifice 
we yet have made. But he had brought the proud- 
est will, the most fearless and fetterless of natures, 
and crucified it. He never looked on Calvary, but 
he saw there another cross ; he never trod this 
earth, but another footfall sounded in his ear. " I 



FOR TO ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST ICQ 

am crucified with Christ : nevertheless I live ; yet 
not I, but Christ liveth in me." 

(2) Again, transposing the words, we may say 
that to the believer, Christ is life. What was life to 
Jesus ? There was in it no haste, no lagging. No 
one ever did so much ; no one ever did so much 
so easily. His life never paused to compromise. 
To its flow there was no refluent tide. Coming he 
cried, " Lo, I come to do thy will, O God " ; living 
he declared, ** I do always those things that please 
him " ; dying he breathed forth the words, '' Father, 
into thy hands I commend my soul." This life, 
we see, was full, it was uniform, it was harmonious. 
To-day we pass into the Sabbath chamber of our be- 
ings ; but oh ! how brief, how broken, our glances 
into it through the past week. Just as there are 
rooms of splendor and beauty in the palace of the 
Vatican which the pope never sees, so are there in 
ever}^ nature neglected and unvisited places. Yes, 
and so must there be, until we dare take these 
words at their true meaning ; until under the 
guidance of the Good Shepherd we turn to fresh 
woods and pastures new in our being; until the 
mighty music of the Master's spirit sweeps down 
from heaven "and fills all the stops of life with tune- 
ful breath." " For to me to live is Christ." Yes ! 

3. Christ is the true end of life. When I am 
asked whether life is worth living, I inquire as 
to what is meant by life ? What are its limits — 



no FOR TO ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST 

or is it illimitable ? Is it a portico to a larger 
and grander building ? Am I beating about in 
the mists that hang over a harbor, and lifting will 
they reveal a golden city and a cloudless sky and 
an eternal inheritance ? If life means this present 
course, and if it be the end, then I am with the 
most hopeless of philosophers in declaring that to 
the majority it is better to die than to live. Breth-'^ 
ren, it is not only that the future demands for its 
own sake a revelation ; it is that it demands it for 
the sake of the present. One school of thinkers 
meets my inquiring spirit with doubts — they are 
not sure ; there may be something beyond the 
grave, and there may not be. A second school 
meets me with a contented ignorance. They have 
passed beyond doubt, which carries with it the pos- 
sibility of decision ; they have attained to the con- 
clusion that we cannot know. A third school meets 
me with blank atheism. There is no God. Well, 
then, what is there ? I can understand the spirit of 
some earnest inquirer who should say : You have 
taken away the confidence of my earlier years, and 
given me ignorance ; you have taken away the 
faith of happier hours, and given me doubt ; you 
have taken away my God, and my father's God ; 
you have stained and poisoned sweet pages in this 
book with scurrilous jests, yourself mocking a dead 
mother's dearest confidences, you have taught me 
to do the same ; but still here is life. Life cannot 



FOR TO ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST I I I 

be a succession of tirades against Christianity ; life */ 
cannot be a series of presidential campaigns, life 
cannot be laughter, epigrams, rhetoric. Your doc- 
trine of evolution, your survival of the fittest, your 
progress of the centuries demand something better 
than Christianity. Where is it? Paul said "To 
me to live is Christ." It was a certainty. What 

can you say? '* To me to live is "what? "Where 

shall wisdom be found ? and where is the place of 
understanding ? The depth saith, It is not in me : 
and the sea saith. It is not with me. Destruction 
and death say. We have heard the fame thereof 
with our ears. God understandeth the way there- 
of, and he knoweth the place thereof. Behold the 
fear of the Lord, that is wisdom : and to depart 
from evil is undertanding." 

We look this morning, to narrow our range, on 
the professing church of Christ. What do we see ? 
Especially in this country, where history and cir- 
cumstances combine to make life full-tided, we see 
numbers of persons in every church in quest of a 
passion which is at all adequate to their instincts 
and their impulses. The moralist condemns the 
disposition to rush into politics or to plunge into 
pleasure. But not I ! This buoyancy, this over- 
flowing vitality, this keen zest is delightful. Come 
from some dreamy ancient city where life stagnates 
and curdles, and touch this, and it is like lifting your 
hand from a pyramid to lay it on an electric battery. 



I 1 2 FOR TO ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST 

Has not Christianity itself quickened the currents of 
being ? They flow fastest when they flow nearest to 
the cross. The psalm of life is loudest and most ex- 
ultant when it is chanted in the resurrection garden. 
What we need is to take this exuberance of life and 
utilize it. Can we not find those who are sighing for 
a newer and richer passion ? They are like Lot on 
the confines of Sodom, making excursions into the 
city, dallying with the forms, fair and fascinating, 
that are there, contradicting the solemn worship of 
this morning by the frivolous or purposeless trifling 
of this evening, and taking to their sleep, this night, 
a heart ill at ease, divided, weary, and lips which 
are too true and too honest to say, '* To me to live 
is Christ " — though they would that it were so. 
But there are others who are like the heroes of that 
earlier time when they launched out into the deep 
and went forth not caring much whither they went, 
so only Christ went with them. To them wild 
waves were but the carpet for his feet, and hoarse 
winds uttered forth his voice ; to them, of divine 
watchfulness and care " the stars sang and the 
sea" ; to them, as to all undivided souls, came 
the inevitable honor of leaving a mark, deep and 
lasting, in the world. 

Dear brethren, this life is worth living just in pro- 
portion as it is full of Christ. A poor rough bar of 
iron thrust into the fire, when it glows through^ 
and through with the splendor of an indwelling 



FOR TO ME TO LIVE IS CHRIST I 1 3 

Spirit, then, indeed, it is mighty through God. 
We are not to possess this Christian Hfe, but rather 
of it are we to be possessed. We are not to get 
this rehgion — that is easy ; but we are to be 
gotten by rehgion — that is the effort and the oc- 
cupancy of a hfe. Dying after a course of honorable 
toil, an eminent preacher of the truth said, a few 
weeks since, ** I value my work more than my 
life." Yes, for it is the work that endures. A 
Christian ? Then deep down in that nature lies 
the foundation which is Christ Jesus. You know 
whom you have believed. You cannot be deceived 
as to Him in whom you trusted perhaps now many 
years since. But let us take heed how we build 
thereupon. For we are laborers together with God ; 
ye are God's husbandmen, ye are God's building. 
May he who was the author, be also the finisher of 
our faith. \ 



H 



IX 



THE MAN WHO NEVER GREW OLD 
(the vigor of moses) 



And Moses was an hundred and twenty years old when 
he died : his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated. 

— Deuteronomy 24. : 7. 



IX 

THE MAN WHO NEVER GREW OLD 
(the vigor of MOSES) 

Here are two statements as to Moses when, on 
the top of Pisgah, he lay down to die ; one as to 
his age, the other as to his vigor. He "was an ' 
hundred and twenty years old," This in these 
times was not remarkable. Aaron, his brother, 
who had died a little before, was as old, but his age 
is barely mentioned by the chronicler. What was 
worthy of note was not the age but the vitality of * 
Moses. No dimness of vision as his eye swept 
over that unequaled landscape, as there had been 
no flagging foot when he climbed the mountain- 
side. At this day it is the second, and not the first i 
statement before which we pause also, for it is not 
the quantity of life so much as its quality that tells. 
Who would care merely to exist for a hundred and i 
twenty years? "To live and not to live," wrote 
the young Pretender, Prince Charles Stuart, in his 
dreary and dishonored old age, "is worse than 
death." A human life is measured not by its du- 
ration, but by its intensity. " Better fifty years of 
Europe than a cycle of Cathay." Here was a man** 

117 



Il8 THE MAN WHO NEVER GREW OLD 

i who grew old but not aged. He is the perpetual 
protest against the disposition to measure every 
life by the same periods, the disposition which says 
with one of these popular generalizations which 
are as bright as they are fallacious, that at fifty a 
man is on deck, at sixty in the cabin, at seventy on 
a raft, and at eighty on a spar. In his splendid 
vigor Moses was on deck at a hundred and twenty 
and in full command of the ship. 

Let us ask. What kept him young? Three 
springs fed the fountain of his perpetual youth. 
What were they? I answer — the absorption of 
I self in a great enterprise, the controlling compan- 
ionship of God, and the habit of looking onward. 

I. Moses had lost self in a great enterprise. 
At the burning bush, forty years before this time, 
he had received from Jehovah his commission : 
" Come now, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, 
that thou mayest bring forth my people, the children 
of Israel, out of Egypt." But long prior to this, 
when he was yet a young prince in the palace of 
Pharaoh, he had determined that to do this should 
be the work of his life. *^ When Moses was grown," ' 
we read, **he went out unto his people." From 
the splendor of the court he turned to the misery 
of the brick fields, and made it his serious and de- 
liberate choice to be a Hebrew rather than an 
Egyptian. He did what not he alone, but in every 
age the heroes of the world have done ; what 



THE MAN WHO NEVER GREW OLD II9 

Alfred of England did when he gave up the quiet of 
the cloister for the conflict of the camp ; and John 
Howard, when he turned from his country seat to 
the prison cell ; and Wendell Phillips, when carry- 
ing with him little save his eloquence, he forsook 
the culture of Boston for the cause of the slave. 

And who shall deny that in linking in his life 
with the great enterprise of freeing his people from 
their long and bitter bondage in Egypt, Moses 
took the best course for the development and dis- 
ciplining of his own powers. It is not the strenuous . 
so much as it is the self-indulgent life which eats ( 
out the strength and saps the fountains of our being. ^ 
As Lowell sang to the poor man's son : 

There is worse weariness than thine, 
In merely being rich and great ; 
Toil only gives the soul to shine, 
And makes rest fragrant and benign ; 
A heritage, it seems to me. 
Worth being poor to hold in fee. 

"Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the 
people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin . 
for a season." It is inevitable that we ask what 
his life would have been had he chosen differently. 1 
In that case the world would not have learned his 
name, unless perchance it was to be recovered from 
some dried-up mummy in the far distant centuries ; , 
the world holds no place in its grateful heart for 



I20 THE MAN WHO NEVER GREW OLD 

the man who only exploits himself, and whose own 
confession when the end is reached is that " Life's 
cup is nectar at the brink, midway a palatable drink, 
and wormwood at the bottom." The grandeur of 
the enterprise into which Moses flung his whole 
soul kept him young. 

But into it he needed to fling his whole soul. 
That he should stand at this hour on the top of 
Pisgah and see the broad territory which he is 
never to possess, is the last and crowning sacrifice 
of self. It is in keeping, however, with all that has 
gone before. Choosing rather, at the first he 
threw himself into the thankless cause of his op- 
pressed brethren ; then he prayed that not he but 
Aaron his brother might be the leader ; at Sinai 
he pleaded that his own name might be blotted out 
if only his nation might be spared ; in the desert 
he wished that not he alone, but all the Lord's 
people might prophesy. His life through we catch 
no single selfish word from his lips. And who shall 
say what sacrifices of his own tastes and powers he 
made in the accomplishment of his choice ? It is 
only at the last that we discover how noble a poet 
was here, as only by one or two casual references 
do we know that he surrendered his home life, his 
wife and children in the absorption of his task. 
And now this is the end of it all. He has founded 
I no dynasty ; his own sons are left in deep ob- 
scurity ; his grave even is to be hidden away ; he is 



THE MAN WHO NEVER GREW OLD 121 

about to obliterate himself. But '' he that loseth 
his life shall find it." Winter dies in the lap of 
spring and summer fades into the glow of autumn, 
and so the whole rich year is rounded out. Moses 
is young at this moment because he is the incarna- 
tion of God's purpose ; he is in the current of the 
world's forward movement ; what are years to him 
who has running in his veins the life-blood of cen- 
turies yet unborn? ''Winter," as Victor Hugo 
wrote in his old age, and as Moses with greater 
truth could say, ''Winter is on my head but eter- 
nal spring is in my heart" 

2. Moses enjoyed the controlHng companionship 
of God. What may have been his own plan, if in- 
deed he had formed one, when he went out to the 
brick fields to deliver his brethren, we do not know. 
You remember how "he looked on the burdens" 
of the Hebrews till his heart was stirred to a pas- 
sion of patriotic fury, under which he struck an 
Egyptian taskmaster dead and buried him in the 
sand. From such outbursts revolutions have often 
sprung. But in this instance no revolution came. 
Four hundred years of servility and serfdom had 
taken the heart out of the people. No single im- 
petuous blow could rouse the dormant national 
enthusiasm. 

Defeated in his own rough conception, Moses 
went out into the wilderness, and for forty years 
abode in comparative solitude. Not suddenly, but 



122 THE MAN WHO NEVER GREW OLD 

by slow degrees, God trained this servant of his for 
his work. Perhaps, as General Gordon said when 
day after day he listened only to the velvet tread 
of his camel's feet on the desert sand, '* he learned 
himself and God." Certainly after the vision of 
the burning bush (which came to him when he 
was eighty years old), Moses left the quiet of the 
wilderness, carrying with him his recovered per- 
sonality (he had almost lost it in the unheroic 
shepherd life), and now it was a personality in- 
spired by a great religious purpose and directed by 
a divine presence. Recall the names of the men 
who have not alone borne the world forward, but 
also at the same time lifted it upward, and you will 
see that these have been their leading character- 
istics — a great personality, inspired by religion and 
directed by God. The form which this took with 
Mohammed, with Cromwell, with John Wesley, is 
for our present purpose immaterial, our interest 
for the moment is with the fact itself And of 
these three points, far above them, dominating and 
directing them, rose the conviction of God's su- 
premacy. You listen to it in the Ten Command- 
ments and in every great utterance of Moses which 
has come down to us : "So the Lord alone did 
lead him, and there was no strange god with him" ; 
and also in his fear for Israel " lest they should say 
Our hand is exalted. And the Lord hath not done 
all this.'* He does not seem to have taken the 



THE MAN WHO NEVER GREW OLD 1 23 

rose-colored view of human nature in which the 
sentimentaHst indulges ; no blighting disappoint- 
ment came to him when the people failed to re- 
spond to their wonderful destiny — but always as 
both of these shadows rose, like the great mountains, 
this persuasion of God, as from everlasting to ever- 
lasting, the permanent dwelling-place of the soul, 
which now for a brief time lived in the wandering 
tent, as his forefathers also had done in their day. 
This is the sound philosophy of life, although some- 
times it has to exclaim with the old Puritan : ** Man 
is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disap- 
pointed. All is vanity and vexation of spirit, but 
I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord ! " 

3. The third source of vigor in Moses we find in 
his habit of looking onward. At the very beginning " 
we are told in the Epistle to the Hebrews, that "he 
looked unto the recompense of reward." And now 
at the close he looks out and away over the land 
he is never to enter, and up into the face of God 
who was waiting to take him home. 

It is not given to every man to see such a pros- 
pect as now lay at his feet, and certainly not to 
have such a guide to its leading points. The devil 
showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world in a 
moment of time ; but it was Jehovah himself who 
showed to Moses the land westward to the sea 
and northward to the mountains and southward to 
the wilderness and eastward to the cradle of his 



124 THE MAN WHO NEVER GREW OLD 

race. An inspiring prospect, and every foot of it 
was to fall to the lot of the people whom he had 
brought thus far. It made him young to behold it 
all, and even to know that in common with Abra- 
ham, who owned nothing but a grave in it, and 
Joseph, who did not even own as much as that, he 
was to possess it in the persons of his descendants. 
He took a fresh lease of life as he lived in the He- 
brew of the future, just as for forty years he had 
lived in the Hebrews now camped at his feet. 
What was it to him that he should not enter into 
that land in person ? In spirit he would. God 
buries the workman but the work goes on ; and if 
what is best in the workman has been put into the 
work he goes on as well. 

Then we think Moses lifted his eyes from that 
prospect and looked up. *' He stands on the 
heights of his life, with a glimpse of a height that 
is higher." A traveler in Japan paused before a 
worker in ivory and watched him carving an ex- 
quisite figure. " Are you not sorry to part with 
one of these works on which you spend so much of 
your life ? " '' No ; I expect the next will be more 
beautiful." The promised land was fair ; it would 
be a golden memory. Heaven was fairer ; it 
would be an everlasting possession. On him who 
looks onward and upward time's corroding touch 
has little power. So the end is in truth only the 
beginning. The forward melts into the upward 



THE MAN WHO NEVER GREW OLD 125 

glance, and Moses is immortal. " No man knoweth 
of his sepulchre unto this day." No ; for he has 
none. ** Dead he is not, but departed, for the good 
man never dies." 

A great purpose inspiring his life, a great pres- 
ence controlling it, a great prospect unfolding at 
the very last — why should not Moses be young ? 
Would you be prematurely old ? It is easy to give 
you the prescription. Be concerned with things 
that perish as you use them ; be selfish and narrow. 
You shall have your reward ! Do you wish to be 
perpetually young ? Then be the very reverse of 
these. Believe me, in the life of this world of 
ours, and of our nation, and of our institutions, and 
of each man and woman, ** age creeps quickly on 
where there is unfaithfulness to the nobler in- 
stincts." It seems to me to be a tragic thing to 
reach the limits of life with parts of our nature, as 
Darwin said of his own lost imagination, ''atro- 
phied " through long disuse. What Christianity did 
for the world two thousand years ago it is doing 
continually for those who accept it with all their 
heart and soul and strength. It is quickening all 
their faculties and giving to them constant employ- 
ment. The limbs grow strong with climbing Pis- 
gah's steep sides and the eye keen with sweeping 
over the prospect from its crest ; the heart which 
feels for Israel in its hunger and thirst can never 
be old, and the soul that weeps over its sins is 



126 THE MAN WHO NEVER GREW OLD 

immortal in its sympathy." "Spring," says Emerson, 
"still makes spring in the mind when sixty years 
are told." And should you live until that score 
be yours you may be younger than you are at this 
hour, if you are living not in the memory of the 
wilderness which lies all behind you, but rather in 
the prospect of the Canaan into whose fair fields and 
fruitful valleys the next generation is to enter ; and 
better yet, in the confidence which breathes in the 
great words with which the psalm that bears Moses* 
name opens : " Lord, thou hast been our dwelling- 
place in all generations. Before the mountains 
were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the 
earth and the world, even from everlasting to 
everlasting, thou art God." 

I live for those that love me 
And for those who hold me true, 

For the heaven that bends above me 
And waits my coming too ; 

For the right that lacks assistance, 

For the wrong that needs resistance. 

For the future in the distance, 
For the good that I can do. 

Can you say this ? Then you have in you the 
secret of perpetual youth. 



THE PROPORTIONS OF A 
TRUE LIFE 



A month they were in Lebanon, and two months at home. 

— / Kings J / 14, 



X 

THE PROPORTIONS OF A TRUE LIFE 

The building of the temple at Jerusalem was 
the first great enterprise in which King Solomon 
engaged. During twenty crowded years the city 
was full of workmen, many of them strange in face 
and tongue, bringing the luxuries of Egypt and 
the industries of Tyre to the doors of a simple, 
hardy race, and familiarizing the Hebrew with the 
arts and tastes of cultured Hfe. Solomon's under- 
taking, in its turn, influenced the world that lay 
beyond his country and his capital. Our text re- 
minds us that echoes of the building now rising in 
Jerusalem were heard in the ringing of the axes 
which laid low the cedars in the forests of Lebanon. 
Four classes of laborers were occupied on the tem- 
ple. There were — toiling in the dark quarries, 
bearing the heaviest burdens — wretched serfs, 
driven to work by the lash of the taskmaster ; a 
little better than they were the slaves, home-born, 
sold for debt or prisoners of war ; on a much higher 
range moved the workmen of the king of Tyre, 
hired out by him, and skilled in the finest handi- 
craft. Independent of all these were the native, 

I 129 



130 THE PROPORTIONS OF A TRUE LIFE 

free-born Israelites, thirty thousand of whom worked 
at felHng and transporting the huge cedar trees. 
These men were divided into three relays of ten 
thousand each ; and one month in every three was 
demanded of each band. Their service was not 
paid, and the work of the officers, of Adoniram, 
who was "over the levy," was so suggestive of the 
bitter bondage of old Egypt or of the earlier curse 
which fell on Adam and Eve, that probably the 
utmost Solomon dared demand of a free-born, high- 
minded, and independent people, was a third of 
their time. ''A month they were in Lebanon, and 
two months at home." 

Reading these words in the Hght of our century, 
we are interested in them at once. If Jerusalem 
sent its echoes into Lebanon, Lebanon seems to 
send its echoes across the centuries and the seas 
to our own lives. This three-fold division of time, 
imposed by the will of an autocrat, is it not pro- 
phetic of the demand which may be heard rising 
from the Hps of labor to-day and here? The 
president of one of the vast iron industries of our 
country has said lately that he would willingly — 
did competition permit — reduce the labor day in 
his mills to eight hours. The proportion is sug- 
gestive. It is not founded on an accidental or 
arbitrary calculation. That a man should not need 
to give more than a third of his time to working 
for his livelihood was one, but it was by no means 



THE PROPORTIONS OF A TRUE LIFE I3I 

the chief reason for this division. Now as then 
the springs of Hfe and being are touched by the 
decree : " One month in Lebanon, and two months 
at home." 

I. Palestine was home : And the claims of the 
family needed "one month in Lebanon." 

Look back, and you will learn that the institu- 
tion of the home was the original basis of all social 
life. That life began when Cain, weary of his 
lonely wanderings, built a city and called it after 
the name of his first-born son. When man ceases 
to roam, ceases to be a nomad, changes the tent 
for the hut, makes for himself a local habitation, 
then, and not before, social life takes root. Look 
around, and you will see that at this hour the 
strong nations are the nations that have homes- 
The people which under the stress of war, in an- 
swer to the appeal of fatherhood, sends forth its 
sons, with the glow of the fireside on their faces 
and their hearts braced by the memories of the 
circle which will never cease to keep for them the 
vacant chair — this is the people that prevails. 

Look within, and you will witness that the love 
for home is stronger and deeper than — shall we not 
say — any other human passion. In Longfellow's 
** Journal," the poet writes : ** Paid my taxes ; which 
gives one a home feeling" ; and it is characteristic 
of the most amiable of men that he could find a 
reasonable cause for satisfaction in performing a 



132 THE PROPORTIONS OF A TRUE LIFE 

duty that is not always a delight. But there was 
reason in what he said. To have a home is worth 
the tax. Better pay taxes than receive relief. " It 
is more blessed to give than to receive." And 
only as we go forth to life, bidding farewell to the 
old home ; only as accident or misfortune breaks 
up the home we have formed for ourselves ; only 
as old age leaves us once more solitary, to recall 
with Job the day "when our children were about 
us," only then do we come to feel how deep that 
home love is. He was dying in the South seas, in 
a scene of tropical loveliness strongly contrasted 
with the barren hillsides of his native Scotland, 
when the old passion came over Robert Louis 
Stevenson, and he wrote, in words which have for 
their undertone the sob of a breaking heart : 

Be it granted me to behold you again in dying, 
Hills of home ; and to hear again the call — 

Hear about the graves of the martyrs the pewees crying, 
And hear no more at all. 

Walking, a lonely man, in the streets of New 
York, John Howard Payne caught, through an 
open wire door, the familiar strains of his own song, 
" Home, Sweet Home," and he sighed, " How little 
they know that the author has no sweet home of 
his own." 

Up in Lebanon the Hebrew would have his 
tides of home affection too ; and like all true and 



THE PROPORTIONS OF A TRUE LIFE 1 33 

pure passion this shall not be left to hunger unre- 
quited. Let twice the time be given to its claim 
that is yielded to daily labor: *'One month in 
Lebanon, and two months at home." 

But I am also reminded that 

2. Palestine was fatherland. Patriotism de- 
manded "one month in Lebanon." Under Solo- 
mon, who remains in history and romance the most 
splendid of her monarchs, the country was reach- 
ing out in a policy of expansion. The king had 
allied himself by marriage with Egypt ; he had 
also opened up direct communication with the In- 
dian Ocean ; he had cemented still more closely 
his father's friendship with Hiram king of Tyre. 
It was inevitable that the wider world would en- 
danger the growth if not indeed the existence of a 
patriotism which had either in hope or fruition, en- 
sconced itself among the hills of the holy land. 
Leave him in Lebanon, and the Hebrew may be- 
come enamored of the nobler heights, the ampler 
forests, the broader prospects, about him. He may 
choose to remain there, and work amid the tall 
trees. For its own sake, and with nothing beyond, 
as an end rather than as a means, work may be- 
come to him the ruling passion of his being. It 
has become this to thousands of his race since. 
At the opposite extreme to idleness — which was 
never a Hebrew vice as it is not ours either — is 
what one may call the secularization of time. A 



134 THE PROPORTIONS OF A TRUE LIFE 

friendly traveler in America has brought this near 
home when he has said : ** Nowhere is there such 
constant and straightforward talk about money, no- 
where is such importance attached to the amount 
of money which a man has acquired or possesses, 
nowhere is it taken so absolutely for granted that 
the object of a man's work is to obtain money, and 
that, if you offer him enough money, he will be 
willing to do any work which is not illegal ; that, 
in short, the motive power with almost every man 
is his wages." 

This unfair emphasis on business is a distinct 
menace to good citizenship. 

No man can afford to lose his patriotism — to be 
practically and of his own accord, a ** man without 
a country." When a commission on labor finds 
Httle children making matches, sewing shirts, work- 
ing in coal mines, it interferes to protect the child. 
It must be saved from its parents. But how many 
men need to be saved from themselves. No man 
was ever intended to become a mere tool. The fact 
that the tool is so finely constructed that its labor is 
immensely remunerative does not affect that. The 
race horse should not be set to drag a dust-cart. 

No country can afford to lose her ablest citizens. 
These workmen among the cedars of Lebanon 
were not the serfs and helots ; they were the best 
of the Hebrew people ; they belonged to the mid- 
dle class, the class which has always yielded to the 



THE PROPORTIONS OF A TRUE LIFE I35 

land that cherished it, the richest results. They 
find their parallel to-day in the men who drive the 
wheels of trade, and foster the industries of the 
States, and control the markets of the world. 
Shall they stand off, absorbed in buying and sell- 
ing and getting gain, while the political fortunes of 
their native land, of their country, fall into baser 
hands, or hands at all events less skilled than 
theirs ? The despot and the demagogue find their 
opportunity only when the best citizens of any 
country surrender themselves to selfish pursuits, 
toiling among the cedars of Lebanon when they 
should be casting their ballots in Jerusalem. Of the 
two-thirds of time which labor has no right to touch, 
the very sanctity of the home demands that a fair 
share be given to these momentous public interests 
at which we are now glancing. The old rule was 
never needed more than it is to-day: "A month 
they were in Lebanon, and two months at home." 
3. Palestine was the seat of the national faith, 
and the voice of religion said : *' One month in 
Lebanon, two months at home." Those cedars 
were falling in Lebanon that the temple might rise 
in Jerusalem, and the temple localized religion. 
To think of the one was instinctively to think of 
the other. " A country," says Thomas Carlyle, 
*' where the entire people is, or even once has been, 
laid hold of, filled in its heart with an infinite relig- 
ious idea, has made a step from which it cannot 



136 THE PROPORTIONS OF A TRUE LIFE 

retrograde." The intention of the temple was to 
give outward form and expression to this great 
national faith. Was it not possible to worship in 
Lebanon — under the blue heavens, among the 
spreading branches of the fragrant cedar trees? 
Yes ; but all experience testifies that if the man 
without a home ceases in time to be human ; if the 
man without a country ceases in time to be civi- 
hzed ; the man without a temple will cease in time 
to be religious. Judaism was a localized religion 
and the instinct to place its sanctuary in the temple 
at Jerusalem must be respected. 

And Christianity? Christianity also localizes 
religion. Not in any external place but in the 
human heart. So Jesus rises above the temple 
in Jerusalem and the hills of Samaria, and says : 
**The true worshiper shall worship the Father 
in spirit and in truth : the Father seeketh such 
to worship him." 

Christianity does more. Pointing to our daily 
work, to our home, to our country, it says : "Seek 
ye first the kingdom of God." It does not claim 
that for love of God a man shall cease to labor to 
provide things honest in the sight of all men. It 
does not claim that for love of God a man shall 
forego the pleasures of home. It does not claim 
that for love of God a man shall neglect his duties 
as a citizen. On the contrary, Christianity raises 
all these by associating them with religion. A 



THE PROPORTIONS OF A TRUE LIFE 13/ 

rounded religious life needs them all. Toil is 
sweeter to him who remembers that Jesus worked 
at the bench, and Peter tugged at the oar, and 
Paul w^ove at the loom. The risk that work will 
become purely secular is a serious risk with us. 
The owner of millions who fell a victim to over- 
work the other day, had an office in his home as 
well as in his place of business, and gave himself no 
respite ; but he lived in splendid philanthropies, 
and redeemed his wealth from sordidness by 
converting it to high uses. 

The home, with all that it suggests, from the 
cradle to the grave, is immeasurably more precious 
when its successes and its disappointments, its sun- 
shine and its shadow, its loss and its gain, are all 
"in the Lord." 

Patriotism embitters and disappoints the majority 
of men who give themselves exclusively to it. 
Bismarck in his old age is tempted to believe that 
he has done more harm than good ; and Wolsey 
can only sigh : " Had I but served my God as I 
have served my king ! " But Gladstone's deathbed 
is cheered by nothing so much as by the news that 
his grandchild is devoting his life to Christian mis- 
sions. A wider fatherland opens before the eyes 
of the dying statesman. 

This, then, is the message which our text brings 
to us. The time has not come when we can afford 
to ignore it. Up there on the slopes of Lebanon, 



138 THE PROPORTIONS OF A TRUE LIFE 

with its noble trees falling as tribute to his home, 
his land, his faith, the Hebrew was reminded of the 
just emphasis of life when he repeated the words 
which are ringing in our ears still ; words which, 
would we but dare to live up to them, might help 
us to leave far behind the Utopia of the poets and 
the daydream of the social reformer : *• One month 
in Lebanon and two months at home." Not among 
the forest cedars but in the wilderness of Judea, 
Jesus laid the emphasis afresh on the same divine 
order : ** Man does not live by bread alone" — by 
the bread of manual toil ; by the bread of domestic 
peace ; by the bread of acquired knowledge ; by 
the bread of national prosperity — no, *'but by 
every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God." 
Put this first, and all these others, lifting their 
heads in grateful recognition of their true and di- 
vine leader, will fulfill each its appointed part in 
making life to be life indeed. '' My most passion- 
ate desire," says Tennyson, *'is to have a clearer 
and fuller vision of God." That vision shall be 
ours when we write up in golden letters as our rule 
of life the words of our text : ** One month in 
Lebanon, and two months at home." 



XI 



THE RESPONSE OF THE BIBLE TO OUR 
INTELLECTUAL NATURE 



His delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth 
he meditate day and night. 

— Psalm I : 2. 



XI 



THE RESPONSE OF THE BIBLE TO OUR 
INTELLECTUAL NATURE 

A LITERARY critic of our own day writing about 
the Bible calls it "great art." As such he refers 
to it in the same breath with the masterpieces of 
Dante and of Milton. This view of the Scriptures 
is not one to which we are accustomed. At first 
it may startle our minds, and almost shock our 
judgments. Does it not savor of irreverence to 
couple the word of God with any human produc- 
tion, however noble ? But think again. It must, 
of course, be clearly understood that to study the 
Bible as a work of art is not to place upon its 
brow its kingliest coronet The supreme gloiy and 
the unshared distinction of this book is that it is 
"able to make us wise unto salvation, through 
faith which is in Jesus Christ." Until it has done 
this, to admire it for any secondary quality is for a 
sinking sailor to praise the graceful lines of the 
lifeboat while yet refusing to be rescued by it. 

At the same time, have you ever thought 
what a subject for honest congratulation it is, not 
only to have a Bible but to have such a Bible ? 

141 



142 THE RESPONSE OF THE BIBLE 

Incorporated into our religion, into our faith, into 
our worship, so firmly that we cannot conceive of 
religious faith and worship apart from it, to me it 
seems of measureless importance that the Bible is not 
a book to be ashamed of even in the presence of the 
warmest hearts and of the loftiest intellects. Of 
no other sacred volume in the world can the same 
be said. Our English Bible is "great art." 

Assuming, then, that such a study of the Scrip- 
tures is fair and worthy, let me ask your attention 
to this one aspect of it : The response of the Bible 
to man's intellectual nature. 

The human mind in its early dawning ; look at 
it. What does it need ? A savage gazing for the 
first time into a mirror whispered in hushed and 
awe-struck tones, ** Oh, I seem to see a world of 
spirits." The mind that was in him looked forth 
from his eyes and from the features of his face. 
He began to understand what forces were within 
him as he saw them reflected there. Think of 
such an awakened mind. In order to do itself jus- 
tice what is necessary? We reply at once, that 
mind must be informed ; that mind must be broad- 
ened ; that mind must be stimulated ; that mind 
must be directed. If he who formed the human 
mind also inspired this book, then we shall expect 
to discover that the Bible informs, broadens, stimu- 
lates, and guides our intellectual powers. Now is 
this so ? I answer, Yes, it is, for 



THE RESPONSE OF THE BIBLE 1 43 

I. The Bible enriches the mind. It is of vast 
importance that in our studies, as elsewhere, we 
keep the best company. The companionship of 
great subjects is in itself a liberal education. Open 
the Bible and at once you find yourself approached 
by themes of the first historical interest. No other 
book in existence teaches history as this book does. 
Let us penetrate no further than Genesis, and let 
us pause there at its first words, " In the beginning." 
The world has grown old now, but is it not inspir- 
ing to know that here we are to be informed how 
things were started ? You feel much as you do 
when you pluck a fair young flower from among 
the knotted roots of some venerable tree. If men 
treasure Plymouth Rock, if they celebrate the year 
when Columbus pierced the mists and brought a 
message from the old world to the new, then in the 
same spirit we turn back to these chapters to live 
over again the days of our childhood as a race. 
Here, then, I see the first man ; I watch the dawn of 
the first sabbath ; with the fall I am present at the 
first sin ; beyond the gates of Eden I shudder at 
the first murder ; I am with Cain as he lays the 
rude foundations of the first city ; I listen to the 
first prayer when men begin to call upon the name 
of the Lord ; with Abraham I go forth in the com- 
pany of the first emigrant and hearken to the 
earliest footfalls of that overland march of empire 
which, in the fullness of time, led man to our own 



144 THE RESPONSE OF THE BIBLE 

continent. Standing there in Palestine I see, as in 
a mirror, the faces of mighty peoples reflected : 
Egypt, Assyria, Greece, Rome, all cast their images 
upon that little plate. The book which begins with 
Mesopotamia, midway between the ancient East 
and the pushing West, closes on Patmos, that little 
island in the mid-sea whence civilization has sailed 
away and away beyond the splendors of the setting 
sun. Now what a wonderful book this is which 
transforms every mind that studies it into a traveler 
wandering among the mightiest nations and the 
mightiest names of all time ! Does the Bible fur- 
nish a response to the awakened intellect? I 
answer, again, Yes, for 

2. The Bible broadens the mind. As a general 
rule, the best-informed is likely to be the most 
liberal man. Ignorance is narrow and narrowing. 
Knowledge, if it does no more than teach us how 
little we know, makes us generous in our judgments 
and hospitable in the welcome that we give to new 
truth. It is delightful at her beck 

To burst all links of habit and to wander far away. 
On from island unto island at the gateway of the day. 

Let us consider for a few moments in what this 
marvelous faculty, our mind, ought to be interested. 

For one thing, in nature. That opening chapter 
of Genesis tells you how God created the heavens 
and the earth. The study of rocks and plants and 



THE RESPONSE OF THE BIBLE I45 

insect and animal life is begun there. I turn to 
the Psalms, and the hills clap their hands, the sea 
roars and the fullness thereof, the heavens declare 
the glory of God and the firmament showeth his 
handiwork. With the crowd on the shore I listen 
to Jesus. The lily, the bird, the leaven, and the 
salt, the city on the hill, the treasure unearthed in 
the field, rise to my mind at once. I pass in among 
the golden wheat, and Paul walks at my side to 
enforce from those ears his noble argument for the 
resurrection of the dead. 

For another thing, we are interested in science. 
The problems with which men are concerning them- 
selves to-day are dealt with here. The origin of 
life ; the evolution of life on a progressive and 
ever-rising plane ; the survival of the fittest until we 
reach the new heaven and the new earth, wherein 
dwelleth righteousness — the Bible speaks to me 
about these. 

Further, we are interested in literature. As 
Hterature alone our English Bible is immortal. 
Daniel Webster read it through once a year for 
its thoughts and its imagery. Edward Everett 
studied it constantly to improve his English speech. 
At the present time it is announced that at least 
six romances are in the press (1890) founded upon 
the Bible. 

We turn from literature to art. What music is 
comparable with David's ? Music thrills to the 



146 THE RESPONSE OF THE BIBLE 

strains of the "Creation," of the ''Elijah," of the 
"Messiah." If sculpture and painting are not 
prominent in this book, certainly this book is promi- 
nent in sculpture and in painting. You would be 
lost in any picture gallery were you ignorant of the 
scenes and of the characters of the Bible. 

From nature and science and literature and art 
you rise to philosophy. You are attracted by that. 
In this book the mind finds itself surrounded by 
the mightiest mysteries with which the intellect 
can grapple. "All the wonders of Greek civiliza- 
tion," Mr. Gladstone has said, "heaped together, 
are less wonderful than is the single book of 
Psalms, the history of the human soul in relation 
to its Maker." 

More practical in your bent, you may be study- 
ing with delight poHtical economy. To do so will 
be to discover that law finds its basis in the books 
of Exodus and Deuteronomy, and that twenty cen- 
turies of light and leading have not taught us as 
yet how to dare to live and let live in the golden 
splendor of the Sermon on the Mount. There is 
no problem rising to the surface at this present 
moment — and surely never were there more — 
which is not met by the teachings either of Moses 
or of Jesus. 

Take this book in your hand, and whether your 
taste lead you into the field of nature or of science, 
of literature or of art, of philosophy or of political 



THE RESPONSE OF THE BIBLE 14;^ 

economy, or if — better perhaps than exclusive at- 
tachment to either of these — you have a generous 
interest in them all, the Bible which informs will 
also broaden your mind in studying them. 

3. Informed and broadened, the human mind 
needs, in the next place, to be quickened. The 
machinery must be put in motion. Remark, then, 
in answer to the inquiry, What further can the 
Bible do for the awakened intellect? that it will 
surely do this — the Bible stimulates the mind. 

When the eyes of the intellect open it must be 
of immense moment where they open. To wake 
up in a museum amid the mummies of old Egypt 
or to wake up in Wall Street amid the roaring 
voices of to-day ! It will certainly influence a 
mind permanently in which of these scenes it be- 
comes conscious of its powers. To feel the stir- 
rings of the new life with the themes of the Bible 
about you is like rising after a night of travel to 
find yourself among the Alps. Towering peaks 
encased in ice or sheeted in snow mount heaven- 
ward around you. There is inspiration in the sight 
and in the air. 

This book deals with subjects of the first im- 
portance. Its coinage bears the image and super- 
scription of the King of kings and passes current 
through all the centuries. A man never feels him- 
self so small as amid these mighty Alps, but it is in 
itself an honor to be dwarfed by them. No petty 



148 THE RESPONSE OF THE BIBLE 

sling stone brings you down, but the sword of a 
giant. Men in all ages, men in all lands are never 
weary of debating the vast themes with which the 
Bible deals. God, man, sin, punishment, redemp- 
tion, free will, eternity ! Is it not something that, 
though I cannot scale these towering mountains, I 
can climb so far up their broad shoulders as to 
obtain far-reaching and inspiring prospects ? 

Further, these themes, perpetually recurring, are 
always among the burning questions of the day. 
Some aspect of theology is sure to confront us or 
some point in conduct. One age may be inter- 
ested in speculation, another may be more prac- 
tical. Our fathers would spend long days and 
nights in discussing a theological problem. We 
rather battle over those questions which are forced 
upon us by our modern civilization. The housing 
of the people, the rights of capital and of labor, our 
duties to our neighbors — these are matters which 
we debate. However this may be, the Bible has 
its word to utter. So long as the mind is what it 
is, so long this book will live and move and have 
a being. 

Another stimulating thought is this : this book 
does not deal with the completed. There are 
boundless possibilities in the subjects with which it 
is concerned. The end is not yet. It points to 
the physical nature and it says, '* As we have borne 
the image of the earthly, even so shall we bear the 



THE RESPONSE OF THE BIBLE 1 49 

image of the heavenly." It turns to the spiritual 
nature and it says, " Eye hath not seen nor ear 
heard, neither have entered into the heart of man 
the things which God hath prepared for them that 
love him." The life that now is comes under con- 
sideration and it says, " Not as though we had 
already attained, either were already perfect." The 
perfect life and the life of Jesus passes before us 
and it says, '* Let us run with patience the race." 

Now it needs no further words from me to con- 
vince you that the intellect, awakening among 
mighty themes, seeing how these themes renew their 
life with every century, learning that to the matters 
with which the Bible treats there is ever an unfinished 
side, will keep awake. No mind can slumber in 
the companionship of this wonderful book. 

4. I add one other consideration. The Bible 
furnishes a response to the awakened intellect, inas- 
much as it gives direction to the mind in personal 
interests of the first concern. The Bible intensifies 
the mind. Time forbids us to do more than glance 
at this point. This book is the book about and the 
book for me. It has no message to the circling 
stars or the changing seasons. This Bible lies in 
the pulpit through the darkness and silence of the 
week. It does not stir to inquiry the pews or the 
walls or the roof, but bring a man in — at once there 
is activity. It speaks emphatically to man. Emerson 
says : ''We infer our destiny from the preparation." 



150 THE RESPONSE OF THE BIBLE 

Yes ; and if so, what a destiny it must be ! The 
cross — I will speak of this alone — is a prepara- 
tion for man's destiny. Christ is the preparation. 
The gospel is the preparation. My mind, which 
has been enriched among the pictured pages of 
Scripture, and broadened as it has led me into fields 
of art and science and literature and philosophy, and 
stimulated as the mightiest and the most momen- 
tous questions at its bidding have gathered all about 
me, is drawn to a point of electric fire with the 
inquiry, '' What must I do ? " " What is all this to 
me? " The very book which has had such tremen- 
dous power to stimulate now lays a hand of velvet 
on me and brings me to the arms of the Saviour. 
Clothed and in my right mind am I only when I 
sit at his feet. 

Among the stories told of the early navigators of 
the Atlantic none is more pathetic than that of Sir 
Humphrey Gilbert. Becalmed amid the icebergs, 
he was last seen on the deck of his vessel with the 
Bible open before him. ** He sat upon the deck. 
The book was in his hands. ' Do not fear ! Heaven 
is as near,' he said, 'by water as by land.' " Like 
this heroic admiral, we find ourselves on this wide 
and wonderful ocean of life, and only the book 
which he read can tell us how to sail its perilous 
waters, how to meet its blasts and icebergs, how 
with honor to reach its further shore. 

I have chiefly dealt to-day with the Bible in its 



THE RESPONSE OF THE BIBLE I5I 

relation to the human mind. I have tried to justify 
the critic who, speaking of it only as a piece of 
literature, characterized it as "great art." Aside 
from all other considerations, I repeat, to me it seems 
to be matter for thankfulness that not only have we a 
Bible but that we have such a Bible. The world 
may refuse to obey its teachings, but the world will 
never cease to be fascinated by its pages. Turn 
any young and eager mind loose amid the contents 
of this book and you will see how rich, how gen- 
erous, how alert, how intense that mind will become. 
The practical conclusion for us now is this : Are 
we doing justice to this masterpiece of " great art," 
this divine gift to our intellectual as well as to our 
spiritual natures ? I do no wrong to our reading 
when I say that it is not very much in the direction 
of great art. We are tempted to-day more than 
ever before to fritter our minds away among the 
papers, pamphlets, tracts, which pour ceaselessly 
from the press. We need to listen to the voice of 
the Master, " Launch out into the deep, and let 
down your nets for a draught." ** Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress" could scarcely be written in this century. 
We know too little of our Bibles. It were no illib- 
eral resolution could we determine that for this one 
day we would confine ourselves to its pages alone. 
The traveler in Rome will often spend weeks among 
the ruins of the eternal city. The shop, the suburb, 
the garden, the Rome of to-day, have no potent 



152 THE RESPONSE OF THE BIBLE 

charm with which to break the spell cast about his 
spirit by the fragments of that earlier civilization. 
But when, through the shining portal of Genesis, 
we enter the treasure city of the Bible, we under- 
take no journey among the ruins of the past. We 
are now in the noblest temple ever built, and as 
we press forward it is in the choicest company ever 
gathered and our aim and distinction is the grand- 
est revelation ever made to the human soul : '' Be- 
hold the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will 
dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and 
God himself shall be with them, and be their God." 



XII 
THE VOICE BEHIND THEE 



And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, 
This is the way, walk ye in it. 

— Isaiah JO : 21. 



XII 

THE VOICE BEHIND THEE ! 

Religiously, the age in which we are Hving is 
an age marked by two very strong and apparently 
conflicting characteristics. On its active side it is 
distinguished by aggressiveness ; on its passive side 
it is full of doubt. The first of these, Christian ag- 
gressiveness, need not excite our surprise. A cen- 
tuiy which has gathered in the great countries of 
Christendom such vast stores of wealth, almost in- 
evitably comes to measure eveiything by a mate- 
rial standard. The force which can bring things to 
pass is the force to be respected. If by no other 
motive our religion is impelled to aggressive action 
that it may vindicate its right to exist. 

Nor, I think, is there anything mysterious in the 
religious doubt of our age. The material develop- 
ment of to-day has been immensely indebted to 
science, to the genius of experiment. The spirit of 
experiment, however, is necessarily a spirit which 
questions. We " prove all things " that so we may 
"hold fast" that which is good. Consequently, 
this questioning habit has become a characteristic 
of our minds, and we need feel no astonishment 

155 



156 THE VOICE BEHIND THEE 

when it is carried into the region of our religious be- 
hef. Now one and now another of the great truths 
on which we have been nourished is seen quiver- 
ing, as it were, in the white heat of the furnace ; 
or perhaps about it gather the mists which obscure 
its clear outlines and leave it dim and undefined. 

Under such conditions — and I believe that they 
have only to be mentioned for us at once to recog- 
nize them as familiar in our own thinking — what is 
our duty? Two answers are given to this ques- 
tion. The first counsels that, abandoning the 
sphere of speculation, we simply confine ourselves 
to action. Let us resolutely practise that " pure 
religion and undefiled before God and the Father." 
But I am persuaded that in the end such a course 
as this must be fatal. How can a man long con- 
tinue to do this when he has no certainty that there 
is a God, but only a belief in some mysterious 
force, or a faint reverence for what he calls " the 
power which makes for righteousness " ? Faith is 
the motive to action, and if faith be dead or dying, 
then before long all energy must die away as surely 
as the wheels slacken and stop when the steam is 
shut off. 

The second answer to our question while en- 
couraging religious activity bids us now and then 
pause. Listen to the words of Isaiah in this chap- 
ter : " Their strength is to sit still. In returning 
and rest shall ye be saved." Their ears shall 



THE VOICE BEHlNt) THEE t^^ 

hear a voice behind them saying, This is the way, 
walk ye in it. To do this is not unscientific. It 
is true to the teachings of all time. The discov- 
eries by which the world is ennobled and enriched 
have been attained after months and years of pa- 
tient research. The laboratory and the study 
have always done their work in silence. Only the 
results have reached the ears of men. An aggres- 
sive and material age needs to learn the priceless 
importance of a spirit of reverie and retrospect : 

For we, brought up and reared in hours 

Of change, alarm, surprise, 
What shelter to grow ripe is ours, 

What leisure to grow wise ? 

This is what we will attempt this morning. Let 
the curtain fall at once between us and the beck- 
oning future. Look and listen to the past. *^A 
voice behind thee." Three such I hear. The first 
rises from the pages of history, the second from the 
treasury of memory, the third from the mine of 
personal experience. 

I. Let us listen to the voice of history. More 
perhaps than any other man the Hebrew was 
throughout all his national existence a man who 
lived in the future. Others might have their golden 
age in the past, not he. From Abraham forward 
the leaders of that great people Hved and died, 
"not having received the promises," but having 



I5B THE VOICE BEHIND THEfi 

" seen them and greeted them from afar." To 
become believers in Jesus Christ as the Messiah was 
only for them to have this forward glance intensified. 
"We are saved," said Paul, "by hope." "Looking 
for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing 
of the great God, and our Saviour Jesus Christ." 

While this is true, however, it is also to be noted 
that the Jew was in the habit of looking back. At 
critical times especially did he pass his national his- 
tory in review. Jacob on his death-bed recounted 
the incidents of his pilgrimage. Moses, when Nebo 
rose before him, looked back on the journeyings in 
the wilderness. Joshua roused the enthusiasm of 
his people by retrospect. David in his last strains 
became the chronicler rather than the prophet. 

To do this was not to weaken the force with 
which the eye, changing its range of vision, swept 
the future. The general has often kindled afresh 
the drooping courage of his soldiers when mar- 
shaled in the face of the foe by reminding them 
how in the heroic past victory has perched on their 
standard. Happily we live at a time when there is 
little need to insist that. 

Thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of 
the suns. 

We believe in God in history. " Call you these 
bare events ? " we should exclaim with Oliver 



THE VOICE BEHIND THEE 1 59 

Cromwell, did any one question this truth — '* God 
pity thee ! " John Newton was doubly right when 
he said that he ** read the New Testament to see 
how God loved the world, and the newspapers to 
see how God governed the world." 

Now here is a practical question. Beset with a 
hundred doubts as to the Christian religion when we 
hear this voice behind us, this voice of history, 
what does it say ? It says many things, but two 
things I think most emphatically. 

First, there can be religious progress only by 
faith, and this faith in the distinct doctrines so dear 
to the apostles, to the first believers, to the re- 
formers, to the prime movers in the great religious 
revival of the last century. Whether they were 
right or whether they were wrong is not now our 
controversy, but we simply give the lie to all his- 
tory if we deny that these men believed with all 
their hearts that Christ was the Lamb of God bear- 
ing away the sin of the world ; that he died the 
just, for us the unjust ; that we can be justified 
only by faith ; that, ruined by the fall, we can be 
redeemed only by Christ and regenerated only by 
the Holy Spirit. Show me the forward step which 
has been taken by the mental habit which simply 
doubts. Criticism may veiy likely find many flaws 
in the characters of Peter, of Luther, of Wesley — ■ 
but the truth remains nevertheless, that by their 
iteration and reiteration of the great doctrines I 



l6o THE VOICE BEHIND THEE 

have enumerated the world has been carried for- 
ward into purer hving and nobler doing. 

Second, religious history now for eighteen hun- 
dred years and more, further declares that precisely 
as in the days when Jesus was on earth the Hoh' 
Spirit was not given because Jesus was not yet 
glorified, so ever since that time, when Christ in 
his divine power as the Son of God, and in his 
redeeming power as the only Saviour from sin, and 
in his renewing power as the indwelling life of the 
soul has fallen into the shade, when preachers have 
dwelt on other matters to the neglect of Him who 
alone justifies the Christian preacher in his right to 
be — then spiritual death has followed. 

Is not this voice in accord with our own obser- 
vation ? Come ! let us hearken to it, for amid the 
many utterances of to-day this note reaches us with 
the incontestable force of nearly two thousand years. 

2. Let us listen to the voice of memory. We 
pass now into chambers more sacred than any that 
history has builded. 

There' s dearer dust in memory* s land 
Than the gold of rich Peru, 
And firm are the fetters by memory twined, 
The wanderer' s heart and soul to bind. 

No wise person consents to a divorce between 
what he thinks and what he feels. Longfellow 
was right when he declared that he cared nothing 



THE VOICE BEHIND THEE l6l 

for a sermon in which he could not hear the heart 
beat. Rehgion is largely a matter of affection. 
Love is the atmosphere of truth, and without it 
truth is hard and cold and barren, as the Austra- 
lian mountains are seen hundreds of miles away in 
the pitiless all-revealing air of that continent. Her- 
bert Spencer has reminded us that our beliefs and 
actions are much more largely determined by our 
feelings than by our intellect ; and South, over two 
hundred years ago, said wisely that " a man's life 
is the appendix to his heart." I am not therefore 
doing despite to intellectual research when I say 
that the voice which memory utters, sweet and 
sad in its tones, ought to be listened to by every 
intelligent person. 

It is a voice of singular clearness. I remember 
once to have passed from a foreign graveyard, full 
of the moldering remains of humanity, to the deep 
vaults of the neighboring church, where were per- 
fectly embalmed and preserved the bodies of men 
who a hundred years before had ministered to the 
spiritual wants of the country-side. And so when 
we descend into the depths where memory holds 
sway, quiet, remote from the outer air, we meet 
with, oh ! so many objects dear to us long ago. 
Moreover, I believe it is just to say that the voice 
of memory is harmonious with truth. Doctor 
Guthrie, dying, asks for a bairn's hymn. The the- 
ology learned at a mother's knee is independent of 



1 62 THE VOICE BEHIND THEE 

reason, perhaps, although not in antagonism with 
it ; but it bears the test of after years wonderfully 
well. Was I wrong when I lingered in childhood 
spellbound under the music of that sweet story of 
old ? Generally, I suspect when people throw off 
the faith they were born in, the best soil of their 
hearts is apt to cling to the roots. Jesus said, 
'* Except ye become as little children ye cannot 
enter the kingdom of heaven." Was he deceiving 
us ? Was he speaking in forgetfulness of the powers 
by which we reason and decide for ourselves? 
When his own memory floats up to us from the 
fields of Galilee — beneficent, compassionate, sym- 
pathetic — is it to be bidden down at the dictates of 
a passionless spirit of cold criticism? No, indeed. 
The truest and tenderest instincts of our hearts 
say, " Never ! " The fathers who went before us 
had their conflicts as we have ours. Their mighty 
assurances were many of them born in great tribu- 
lation. Did the mother never doubt, or the teacher, 
or the pastor ? We see the jewel flashing on the 
forefinger of all time, but not the hours of labor 
and of suffering which were spent before that jewel 
was brought to the light. Yet believe me such 
hours there were ! 

Again I ask, Is not this voice of memory, fragrant 
with the breath of prayer, musical with the words 
of Jesus, in accord with our own observation ? 
Come, let us hearken to it, for amid the many 



THE VOICE BEHIND THEE I63 

utterances of to-day this note also reaches us with 
vast and eloquent force. 

3. Let us listen to the voice of personal expe- 
rience. There has been a time in the life of every 
believer in Christ when his religion was the one 
real thing. He lived amid the unseen and the 
eternal. Such a life God himself had mapped out 
for the people of Judah now if they had been 
faithful to it. But with that very active power 
Egypt on the one side and that equally active 
power Assyria on the other, the things which were 
seen and temporal rose up like "walls of granite 
in a shadowy pass," and hid the sunshine and shut 
out the clear fresh air. The experience of many 
Christians is not unlike to theirs. The world with 
its cares, its claims, its laughter and its tears, its 
friendships and its rivalries, is *'too much with us." 
Gradually the spiritual side of our life falls into 
disuse. We rarely climb the watchtower now to 
see the King in all his beauty. Such religion as we 
preserve is formal and mechanical, the tick of a 
clock wound up once a week, not the beating of a 
heart endued with the power of an endless life. 
But those early religious experiences, and these 
later and less frequent experiences have a voice. 
What do they testify? Under their influence you 
confess that you have had your happiest hours. It 
did not seem so incredible that you should some 
day be in heaven. And under them you did your 



164 THE VOICE BEHIND THEE 

best work. When Robert Robinson in the dreary 
wilderness to which he had wandered in his denial 
of the divine nature of Jesus, heard a hymn of his 
own written long before when his heart was full of 
love for Christ, he burst into tears. He was not 
in error when he penned those lines. That work 
was better than he could do now ! And you were 
truest to your own self It was not a matter to be 
ashamed of — even though you might recall it from 
the side of an open grave, or from the bed of 
death, but you taught the ignorant, cheered the 
faint, spoke mighty words of faith to the doubter, 
and rang the clear note of conviction into some heart 
clouded with fear — no ! that voice behind you tells 
you that when you have prayed, when your heart has 
burned within you under the sound of God's word, 
when you have worked for eternity — then you have 
been most of a man. Come then again, I cry, let 
us hearken to that voice, for it is worthy to be heard 
amid all the discord of the present age, a voice of 
mighty and wholesome power. 

History, memory, personal experience, each one 
of these is a voice behind us. For a few mo- 
ments we have dared to shut out the cries of to- 
day and to-morrow, and have listened to these 
tones from yesterday. Now, with our minds and 
our hearts full of these great inspiring utterances, 
let the curtain rise once more. Live in the pres- 
ent ; face the future. But what has this three-fold 



THE VOICE BEHIND THEE 165 

voice behind us done for us ? I answer, in con- 
clusion, it has done two things. 

First. It has pointed with mighty assurance to 
the way in which we have to walk. On the right 
hand the mountain-side of unbelief, on the left 
hand the abyss of utter ignorance, our path lies 
straight before us. I am not claiming that we can 
see with absolute clearness. We cannot. But 
history, memory, and personal experience unite to 
declare that we make no mistake in standing in 
the old paths. Our fathers may not have been so 
learned as we, but they were possibly quite as 
wise. Certainly they were not fools. They had 
their deep thoughts as we have ours. The men 
who planned our laws, builded our constitution, 
planted our national life, did so very much in sim- 
ple faith in God as their present helper, in Christ 
as their only Saviour, in the Holy Spirit as their 
guide, in the Bible as an authoritative voice from 
heaven, and in prayer as the daily and hourly com- 
munication with the skies. I am sure that history, 
memory, and experience are likely to be right when 
to me they say, ''This is the way, walk ye in it." 

Secondly. This "One clear voice of divers tones " 
bids us go on. ''Walk ye in it." Progress not by 
forgetfulness of the past, but by reverence for it. 
To start from no yesterday is to reach no to-mor- 
row. To ignore the daydawn is to ignore the 
sunset. We are on a road which leads clear out 



1 66 THE VOICE BEHIND THEE 

of the ages which are past, and clear on to the 
ages which are yet to come. The scholar comes 
to his studies with all the wealth of bygone studies 
as his guide. The mightiest army in the world 
marches, it has been said, "with the swing of cen- 
turies of conquest." When Christ appeared the 
counsels which were from everlasting impelled him 
in his course to the cross, the sepulchre, the mount 
of ascension. So let our life flow on as the great 
rivers that move like God's eternity. We also go 
forward, and it is in the spirit of the apostle writ- 
ing to the Hebrews when turning from the long 
processions of faithful men and women of whom 
the world was not worthy, he cries, "Wherefore, 
seeing we also are compassed about with so great 
a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, 
and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let 
us run with patience the race that is set before us." 
" Thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, say- 
ing, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to 
the right hand, and when ye turn to the left ! " 



XIII 

OBEDIENCE THE SOLVENT 
OF DOUBT 



If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, 
whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself 

—John 7 .• //. 



XIII 

OBEDIENCE THE SOLVENT OF DOUBT 

These words enshrine one of those great princi- 
ples of which the teachings of Jesus are so full. 
The principle in this instance is one of perpetual 
importance and was never needed more than it is 
now. As we read the text in our version, however, 
we fail to get this principle clearly before our 
minds, and indeed we may even mistake it alto- 
gether. The Revised version reads : **If any man 
willeth to do his will, he shall know of the teaching, 
whether it be of God, or whether I speak from 
myself." Comparing this with the words as we 
have them in our text, you will see how important 
is the difference. " If any man will do God's will " 
calls only for an external obedience. From inferior 
motives, from fear, from formalism, from fashion, 
men will perform the will of God. Balaam did 
when he blessed Israel, though his base heart would 
rather have cursed them. But this is not what 
Christ said. No. " If any man willeth to do 
God's will." Here we are led into the man's mind 
and soul. His obedience is not "from the teeth 
outward/' His whole will is set to do the will of 

169 



170 OBEDIENCE THE SOLVENT OF DOUBT 

his Father in heaven. This is what Jesus taught 
here. When any man is fully and heartily resolved 
to do God's will, then he shall hold in his posses- 
sion the one sure test by which to decide on the 
value or worthlessness of religious teaching. 

The text reminds us of the abiding perplexity 
about Jesus of Nazareth. He was teaching in 
Jerusalem. By common consent, as the last verses 
in this very chapter say, ** Never man spake like 
this man." Whence then, it was asked, came his 
spiritual insight? ''How knoweth this man learn- 
ing? " He owed nothing to the schools. He was 
self-taught. He had never crossed the threshold 
of any college. He had not sat at the feet of any 
Gamaliel. This calm, dogmatic tone of his, finding 
its voice in his words "I say unto you," might be 
the presumption of sheer ignorance, but it might 
be the prerogative of divine light. Did that light 
die out with the last of the prophets ? Or was this 
the star foretold so long ago, and was Simeon right 
when he called Jesus ''A light to lighten the 
Gentiles" ? 

Our Lord answered this conflict of opinion : " My 
teaching," he said, " is not mine, but his that sent 
me. If any man will do his will, he shall know 
about this teaching whether it be of God or of 
myself" " Fear God. Keep his commandments 
from the heart, then come with your illumined 
judgments to these words of mine." The principle 



OBEDIENCE THE SOLVENT OF DOUBT I7I 

of our text, then, is this : Obedience the solvent of 
doubt. Put into a very famihar proverb we can 
say, **The fear of the Lord is the beginning of 
knowledge." 

At this time we will examine for a while this 
will that holds the key to the knowledge of true 
religion. ** If any man willeth to do his will." I 
remark that it has two conspicuous characteristics, 
intelligent submission and active obedience. 

I. Intelligent submission is the first of these. 
"If any man willeth to do his will." What is 
involved here? 

Plainly, in the first instance, a divine will. "His 
will." This universe, this world, this society in 
which we live, we ourselves, are ruled by law. 
What is this law? I answer: It is God's will. 
Until we discover this our life, and the life of all 
time, is like the alphabet flung down on the floor 
in no sort of order. When we do discover it, it is 
like these letters combined to form the Decalogue. 
I should say that the supreme moment in any 
man's existence comes not when he sights a new 
continent ; opens a fresh avenue to fortune ; stands, 
the artist, before his masterpiece ; wins, the poli- 
tician, the proudest place — no, but when he lays 
his finger, tremulous with the joy of discovery, 
thrilling with the gladness of satisfaction, upon this 
one truth : God has a will about me — about me 
in reference to the business, to the purpose, to the 



1/2 OBEDIENCE THE SOLVENT OF DOUBT 

study, to anything that is coming within the rangt, 
of my Hfe. 

Then, intelligent submission implies further that 
this divine will we can discover. Christ never 
demanded, as some of his followers since have 
demanded, blind, unreasoning acquiescence. He 
never said, as some of his followers since have said. 
Believe, do not think, do not search, only believe 
and obey. At this very time he appeals to the 
reading of these Jews. He says, ** Did not Moses 
give you the law?" If God had demanded only 
bhnd submission he would not have created us 
with minds. It needs no mind to know that fire 
burns or that water drowns. Let the law, like 
some tall granite cliff, be reared in my path ; I dare 
it and am dashed to atoms on its pitiless front. 
If God had demanded blind submission he would 
not have given us this Bible. This is the revelation 
of his working in the past. It needs to be read 
intelligently. Then the jeweled finger of the cen- 
turies gives point to the present and emphasizes 
the duty of to-day by means of the history of yes- 
terday. If God had demanded only blind submis- 
sion he would not have appointed prayer. There 
is no path of approach to a tyrant's throne. Even 
the judge sits on the bench remote in the majesty 
of the law. But prayer opens the door of heaven 
at the touch of a child's finger and that door swings 
to the plea of God's fatherhood. "After this 



OBEDIENCE THE SOLVENT OF DOUBT 1 73 

manner pray ye, Our Father." If God had de- 
manded only blind submission he would never 
have spoken to us in the Spirit. " Love me ; keep 
my commandments," says Jesus, and the Spirit of 
truth shall come. " He shall teach you all things." 

This mind of yours, this Bible, this privilege of 
prayer, this legacy of the Holy Spirit, all declare 
that God's will can be discovered. It is no shrouded 
mystery. It is no silent enigma. It comes to us 
with open face, with lips musical with mercy, saying, 
"Seek, and ye shall find." 

What more is implied besides a divine will which 
we can discover ? I answer : A divine will to 
which we can submit. Read the correct reading 
of our text, " If any man willeth to do his will." 
The battle of the will is fought out here. We are 
in this world, where every natural force is made to 
yield to man's will. Man's will digs the coal and 
captures the lightning and controls the stream. In 
the face of this imperious will there is no force 
in nature which dares say, **I won't" if man says 
"You shall." Now, the conflict is almost inevitable 
between our will, so accustomed to rule, and this 
yet higher will, the will of God. In few words it 
seems that the struggle resolves itself into this : 
Shall we bend the divine will to ours, or shall we 
bend our will to the divine ? The heathen uses his 
idol to enforce his own will. If it fails to do so he 
burns it or casts it into the gutter. And some 



174 OBEDIENCE THE SOLVENT OF DOUBT 

Christians use prayer in the same way. They 
desire to bend the will of God until it conforms to 
theirs. Jesus here, and always indeed, insists that 
our will must be submited heartily and intelligently 
to the will of God. The old saying ran, ''The 
voice of the people is the voice of God." So far 
do we believe this to be true that when the nation 
has spoken its voice at the polls we all submit. 
No single will, no group of wills dares rebel. 
What is only partially true in this illustration is 
absolutely true in the region of God's direct action. 
He has a will. I can find out what it is ; I can 
submit to it. 

You may notice that in all I have been saying I 
have given the widest possible interpretation to this 
word "will" as applied to man. "What," it may 
be asked, " if I intellectually acquiesce in this doc- 
trine of the imperial authority of God's will, shall 
I hold the test of truth in my hand?" Oh, no ! 
"Well, then," it may be further asked, "if my 
feelings agree that God shall be supreme, though 
my mind is scornful, rebellious, shall truth come to 
me then?" Again I answer, "No." The whole 
man is what I understand by the will. There are 
natures which are like the oak whose iron trunk 
never bends, though the branches sway in the tem- 
pest. There are other natures like that oak fallen, 
its trunk prostrate in the dust, but its leaves blowing 
yet in very willfulness of life. The stubborn will 



OBEDIENCE THE SOLVENT OF DOUBT 1 75 

with the swaying emotions — that is not man. The 
conquered will but the rebellious emotions — that is 
not man. Join the two. It is false to say that in 
religion the intellect alone counts. Your mind 
cannot use truth unless your heart has felt it. The 
path to all truth lies through the heart. It is 
equally false to affirm that character alone counts, 
that a man's judgment and opinions as to truth 
may be all wrong, and it matters not so long as the 
heart is in the right place. The secret of right 
living is right thinking. The will of which Jesus 
here spoke was alike the clear mind and the glow- 
ing heart. A man should aim, like John the Bap- 
tist, to be a burning and a shining light. When 
Jesus spoke thus, was he not speaking from his 
own experience ? What did he learn in the wil- 
derness? It was his will to do God's will as it 
was written in Scripture. That gave him the 
touchstone of truth before which the words of the 
tempter shriveled up into the black and poisonous 
lies that they were. What did he mean but this 
when he said, ** My judgment is just because I seek 
not mine own will but the will of him that sent 
me"? In the garden of Gethsemane it was this 
mighty principle that conquered : " Nevertheless, 
Father, not as I will, but as thou wilt." We are 
saved, we are redeemed, we are heirs of glory be- 
cause, in the complete humiliation of his earthly life, 
our Lord's will was to do the will of his Father. 



176 OBEDIENXE THE SOLVENT OF DOUBT 

2. The second condition on which we can obtain 
religious knowledge is active obedience. '* If any 
man's will be to do God's will." 

It is a very familiar truth which is here enforced. 
Emerson has put it well when he says, "There is 
much that a man must act as life before it can be 
apprehended as truth," Saul's armor is not good 
to David because he has not proved it. There is 
a great deal of doubt which arises from doing what 
the Jews were doing here. They confined knowl- 
edge to the schools. Schools are places for asking 
questions, for forming theories, for building up sys- 
tems. No man ever learned to be an architect 
who had not climbed the building as it grew. No 
man ever learned to be a sailor who had not put to 
sea and driven his vessel through the wild waves 
and blustering storms. Even John the Baptist 
doubts when he is shut off from the active life in 
the prison cell. Not even the Spirit of God brood- 
ing on the face of the waters can create a world. 
God must speak and bid the light appear. Doubts 
are the natural results of a mind confined to the 
schools. Every college must have doors that swing 
outward to let the student go forth and try his truth 
in the world of action. The doctor is called to see 
a patient troubled with some form of hypochondria. 
How close the room is ; and see, the shutters are 
tightly fastened. What is the cure? Fresh air, 
light. That is the cure for a good deal of doubt. 



OBEDIENXE THE SOLVENT OF DOUBT I// 

I claim that it is a sin to brand every doubter as 
though he were a child of the devil. Paul was a 
heretic in the estimation of the majorit}', and it was 
for so-called heresy that Christ was crucified. But 
only ask this question, " Is it your will to do God's 
will?" Where does this lead? Where the doc- 
tor leads his despondent patient, out into the 
world of action. Will you look at Christianity in 
motion ? Then you shall know whether it is of 
God or only of man. 

Think, for example, of the initial truth in the 
life of the soul — conversion. It cannot be ex- 
plained. It is like birth, says Jesus ; it is like the 
wind. But what is it? No one was ever converted 
who paused until that question was answered. But 
let any one say, My will is to do God's will in this 
matter — then he is converted. It is no more he 
that liveth, but Christ liveth in him. His life, then, 
he lives by the faith of the Son of God. 

Or think of the substitution of Christ, dying the 
just for us the unjust to bring us to God. I do not 
say that it is unnatural, for there are many proofs 
ready to my hand that it falls in with a vast, far- 
reaching law — but I do say that such analogies help 
us very little. That cross with his Son upon it 
lifted up to draw all men unto him is God's will. 
"As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, 
even so must the Son of man be lifted up." Let 
any one say, " My will is to do God's will in this 



178 OBEDIENCE THE SOLVENT OF DOUBT 

great miracle of divine love," then for him Christ 
has died. He believes and he shall never perish. 

Or think of Christian discipleship. ** Whosoever 
will," whosoever has a will, that is, *'to come after 
me." What is this discipleship ? Try it On the first 
opportunity deny self when self comes into conflict 
with God. Take up the first cross that lies in your 
path. Now see those footprints of Jesus, and one 
by one tread in those footprints henceforth. Fol- 
low him. Then you shall know what this doctrine 
of discipleship is. 

So I might go on from one point to another 
until with rapt and eager eye we pause before the 
gates of heaven. What is it? *' It doth not yet 
appear what we shall be, but we know that when 
he shall appear we shall be like him." 

Doing God's will, in no servile or grudging tem- 
per, but in the spirit of Him who said, " I delight 
to do thy will, O God," we shall know of every 
teaching, whence it comes, and whose the image 
and superscription that it bears. 

Our text, then, promises no light to the dreamer, 
the theorist. It demands in every case action. Do 
God's will as to conversion, as to accepting Christ, 
as to discipleship. Then you shall know ; for here 
as elsewhere the golden words of Pascal apply : 
"The things of man must be known in order to be 
loved ; the things of God must be loved in order 
to be known." We began by saying that the 



OBEDIENCE THE SOLVENT OF DOUBT 1/9 

principle here laid down is for all time. It is for all 
ages and generations — *'If any man." I conclude, 
then, with the application to ourselves. 

Here is the man beginning to think for himself 
He finds his mind. It is not the mind of his mas- 
ters, but it is that fresh, fearless personal possession 
— his own mind. Very hkely in the joy of this 
discovery — which sometimes comes to us late, at 
other times early in life, and in matters of religion 
is too often the last discovered faculty — he tries to 
square revelation to his mind. He is himself the 
final voice. It is as if a locomotive should resolve 
to make the iron road follow its wild and wayward 
course. But let the man bend before the divine 
will. Let him even as he drives into the mists dare 
to sing, **Lead, kindly Light." What then ? Then 
shall he know of Christ's teaching whether it be of 
God or whether he spake of himself I have seen 
too much, I have felt too much of this painful and 
aching doubt to speak harsh words of condemna- 
tion. Christ never spoke them. He claimed only 
the submissive will, the active obedience, and then 
he had no fears for that mind. A man never put 
God at the helm only to make shipwreck. 

But here is another man waking up to find a life, 
and that life his own. How many a young man 
discovers himself when for the first time he goes to 
the polls to vote. Now he is a man ! He reaches 
back and touches the hand of the father of his 



i8o OBEDIENCE tHE SOLVENT OF DOUBT 

country. He is in line with him, and he keeps the 
Hne for generations yet unborn in the golden future 
of this great land. But so is he finding all his 
powers. Not only the powers political, but those 
that are social and deal with the home and the 
family, and those that are commercial and deal 
with the business and the work. He may try — 
thousands do — to force his religion to play the 
courtier or the sycophant to his own life. Religion 
has sung its Te Deum when tyrants were crowned. 
Religion has taken its offerings from hands stained 
with blood or befouled with dishonesty. The end 
of that course is death. Religion cannot breathe 
as a slave. Like John the Baptist it loves liberty, 
and must perish if above its head Herodias dances 
and Herod drinks. But now reverse this process. 
Take God as the supreme will of your life. Carry 
his gospel into your existence, as citizens, as house- 
holders, as husband, lover, friend ; fear not to let 
its light shine in the *' common round and trivial 
task." Then shall you know how true are these 
great words of the Apostle Paul, ** Godliness is 
profitable unto all things, having promise of the 
life that now is and of that which is to come." 
*' Now the God of peace, that brought again from 
the dead our Lord Jesus . . . make you perfect in 
every good work to do his will, working in you that 
which is well pleasing in his sight, through Jesus 
Christ ; to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen." 



XIV 
PURE AND UNDEFILED RELIGION 



Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father, 
is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, 
and to keep himself unspotted from the world. 

— James i : 2"/, 



XIV 

PURE AND UNDEFILED RELIGION 

The Epistle of James is unlike all other writings 
in the New Testament, and this verse is unlike all 
other verses in the Epistle of James. Of them all 
it is the one which remains in our memories. The 
apostle's somewhat formal style of writing suddenly 
breaks off, and as through a rent in the rocky shore, 
reveals a gHmpse of blue sea indescribably beautiful. 

It is a mistake, I believe, to say that we have 
here a definition of what religion is which is in- 
tended to satisfy the demands of precise thought. 
Simply this is a description of the utter unlike- i 
ness of true religion to the religion of the man 
who seeming to be rehgious yet ''bridles not his 
tongue." Such a religion, the apostle says, ''is 
vain," for "pure religion and undefiled before God 
and the Father, is this." 

The word which is here employed for "religion" 
is almost peculiar to James. And it is highly char- 
acteristic of him. It does not mean the root, 
source, or principle of religion, but only what we 
should perhaps call religious services. A heathen 
rather than a Christian word, in one aspect of it 

183 



184 PURE AND UNDEFILED RELIGION 

it means superstition, in another ritual. Now James 
was the Hebrew of the Hebrews among the prom- 
inent disciples of Jesus. He was a devoted ad- 
herent of the law, his mind was steeped in the spirit 
\ of the old prophets, and tradition says that he dwelt 
continually in the courts of the temple at Jerusalem. 
So he speaks here of the formalist in the church of 
Christ, who has no control over that tongue which 
James himself brands as ''a fire," ''a world of iniq- 
uity," "an unruly member of evil, full of deadly 
poison." And of that man's religious service he 
says that it is vain. 

The danger with all of us is that we take partial 
« views of what religion is. We dwell only on one 
, side of the mountain, and by and by we forget that 
. it has any other side. We sun ourselves on its 
southern slopes, or brace ourselves to fresh en- 
deavor on its northern exposure, and so our life 
becomes partial and ill-balanced, instead of being 
complete and well-rounded. One man says, Re- 
ligion is what I profess : it is creed. Another says, 
Religion is what I do : it is conduct. A third says, 
Religion is what I am : it is character. But in our 
text James, speaking only of the whole religious 
service of a truly devout Christian life, says. It is 
not one of these alone, nor two. It is all three. 
» Creed, conduct, character, all are included in "pure 
religion and undefiled." Those three points our 
verse contains. Let us think upon them now. 



PURE AND UNDEFILED RELIGION 1 85 

I. Here is religion in the presence of God, my 
faith. We have already glanced at the case which 
the apostle had in mind, and what called out these 
words. James claims that the religion of the form- 
alist be carried up and tested before the highest 
tribunal. The supreme Arbiter he sees there alike • 
in the grandeur and the graciousness of his nature. 

He is first "our God." The man who now stands 
before him not only deceives others, but worse far 
he deceives himself In the true rendering of the 
previous verse, "He thinketh himself to be relig-l 
ious." He is like one who has seen only the outer 
courts of the temple, with the dwellings of the 
priests. What if he pass within ? What if he see 
the great altar smoking with its sacrifices ? What 
if he be present when the high priest enters hushed 
and awe-struck into the holiest of all ? Each step 
nearer to the heart of the great sanctuary fills his 
soul as never before with the tremendous holiness 
of religion. Yesterday he was only like an Israelite 
camping at the foot of Sinai. To-day he is like 
Moses on the mountain height, seeing the very face 
of the Almighty. James knew what it was to pen- 
etrate into "the secret place of the Most High."* 
Stories about him which there seems no reason to 
question, tell us that he was called "the Just" He 
was holy from his birth, and like John the Baptist 
abstemious and ascetic. Alone he used to go into 
the temple, and there he was commonly found 



1 86 PURE AND UNDEFILED RELIGION 

upon his knees in prayer, so that as the simple 
comparison runs, those knees grew dry and thick 
hke a camel's from his so constantly bending them 
on the hard marble floor before God. In commun- 
ion with the true God all things are seen in their 
reality. And the false, the shallow, the merely ex- 
ternal, shrivel up and wither away. A religious 
service which is vain cannot stand in the presence 
of the Lord. 

But, further, this supreme Arbiter before whom 
our religion is to be tested, is also ''our Father." 
We have said that the writer of these words was 
full of the spirit of the old prophets. Now one of 
the great truths upon which they insisted was the 
fatherhood of God ; his care for his children, his 
love for them. Their conflicts with the priests 
raged around this truth. Both agreed that pure 
i religion would manifest itself openly ; but the first 
claimed that this manifestation would be ritualistic, 
the prophet that it would be moral. He heaps 
scorn upon a religion which failed to relieve the 
^oppressed, judge the fatherless, and plead for the 
widow. He pictured God himself as appealing 
against the burnt offerings and the vain oblations, 
and the spreading forth of hands, and making many 
prayers. He heard the voice of God saying, " Is 
not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the 
bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and 
to let the oppressed go free ? . . Is it not to deal thy 



PURE AND UNDEFILED RELIGION 1 8/ 

bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor 
that are cast out to thy house ? when thou seest 
the naked, that thou cover him ; and that thou hide 
not thyself from thine own flesh ? " 

Are these words three thousand years old, or 
were they spoken yesterday? My brother, the 
supreme Arbiter is ever the same. Our religious 
service must be carried into the fierce light of di- 
vine reality, and measured by the beating of the 
heart of infinite pity. Is it pure then ? There is 
it undefiled ? This is the first answer furnished us 
by our text to the question — What is religion ? 

2. We see here religion in its effect upon con- 
duct. It is this, ''To^jdsit." This is the side of 
religion which confronts the world in which we live. 
We may call it compassion, or beneficence, or 
charity ; but words are poor to do it justice. 
Three of its pictures are suggested here : 

First. True religion is active. "To visit." The 
peril with all organized charity is that it does its 
work by proxy. It subscribes, it sends mission- 
aries, it pays evangelists, it supports pastors. This 
is surely out of sympathy with the spirit of the 
gospel. The great truth about God's love was 
that it came itself to our world, incarnate in the 
person of Jesus Christ. And when our Lord, in 
his parable of the last judgment, describes the test 
which will be applied to us all, what is it? I was 
an hungered, I was thirsty, I was a stranger, I was 



1 88 PURE AND UNDEFILED RELIGION 

naked, I was sick, I was in prison. And then — 
what didst thou do ? 

The force of this appears if we notice, further, 
that this true rehgion is unselfish. ''To visit the 
fatherless and widows in their affliction." Proba- 
bly the apostle had in his mind the fatherhood of 
God to which he had just alluded. God was ** the 
Father of the fatherless." Already in the church, 
although it was not many years old, human sorrow 
I had asserted itself There were graves in the 
cemetery where breaking hearts had buried their 
dead out of their sight. The path which Jesus trod 
at Bethany, the tears which there Jesus wept, the 
last enemy which Jesus faced — their Christian faith 
had not delivered the beHevers from these. The 
earliest appeal to the benevolence of the church 
was on behalf of the widow. And in her loneli- 
ness, with the little children clinging to her, she 
has been ever since the embodiment of the Mother 
of Sorrows. James bids the strong and the happy 
and the well-to-do to turn aside and tread the 
cypress-lined road where that figure waits in the 
great solitude and anguish of her grief Visit, not 
by proxy, but personally, human misery, f 

And why? Because true religion is not only 
activ e and unselfish, but it is also sympathetic. 
There is something which money cannot do, but 
which the throbbing heart of compassion can. 
The apostle does not narrow the office of religion 



PURE AND tJNDEFILED RELIGION 1 89 

to gifts, however worthy. He bids us do what 
friends and neighbors did in Bethany when Mary 
and Martha lost their brother Lazarus. They 
came to them. Sympathy does not mean a hand 
full of gold, nor lips fluent with cheap condolence. 
Often it is poor in worldly goods ; often it has no 
words to utter. But it comes because it has trod- 
den that path itself. Sympathy, remember, is not i 
feeling for another, it is much more than that — it 
is feeling with another. We do not therefore con- 
fine the thought of the text to the widow and the 
fatherless in their affliction. The root of the 
trouble which separates nation from nation, class 
from class, is lack of sympathy. The rich are \ 
heartless because they do not know what it is to 
be poor. The strong are pitiless because they do 
know what it is to be weak. How little I know of 
the dreadful force of circumstances which landed 
this man in the jail ; drove that poor drifting wreck, 
once a sweet, pure child, to shame ; and buried that 
boy of promise in a drunkard's grave. Oh, the deep 
truth in the inscription in the Jewish graveyard over 
some flagrant sinner — ''Thou knowest." Yes, God 
knows. Let us try to know also. 

This sympathy was the secret of Christ's power 
when he was here. He was poor, he was home- 
less, he was despised and rejected of men. But 
yet he visited the fatherless and the widow in their 
affliction. It was this sense of what he had been, 



I9O PURE AND UNIDEFILED RELIGION 

and could now be no longer, which quenched the 
light, and took the sweetness from the air, when 
he lay in the sepulchre. A friend of Tennyson, 
walking with him in his garden said, '' What do 
you think of Christ?" The poet remained silent 
awhile, and then he answered, ^' Look, here is a 
flower. What the sun is to this flower, Christ is to 
me." Brethren, our religion should be light and 
warmth and life itself to the dark, chill, desolate 
world around us. Believe me, 

' Tis worth a wise man' s best of life, 
'Tis worth a thousand years of strife, 
If thou canst lessen but by one 
The countless ills beneath the sun. 

3. We see here religion in its influence over 
character. '* To keep himself" We shall do 
an injustice to the apostle's thought, if we take the 
word ''world" as meaning only what leads us 
astray. I suppose that it stands in the thought 
of James for the present state of things. To it 
Paul alludes when he says of Demas that he has 
forsaken him having loved this present world. 
John sums up all that is in the world, as "The lust 
of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of 
life." James himself bids us remember that the 
friendship of the world is enmity with God, and that 
whosoever will be a friend of the world is the enemy 
of God. It is not, then, only what is distinctly evil. 



PURE AND UNDEFILED RELIGION IQI 

Flood this world with God ; and the flesh, the 
eyes, the life, would all be glorified and reclaimed. 
The danger in them now is that they are without 
God. So we are brought face to face with the 
problem which has never ceased to press upon 
thoughtful men for solution. This life that now is^ 
its interests, its ambitions, its employments — how 
shall I treat it ? How can we harmonize ourselves 
with our environments ? There are three answers. 

First. Seek the world. Why should a man^- 
quarrel with fate ? Is he not endowed with pas- 
sions and appetites and tastes ? Does not the tide 
sweep him forward ? Why not yield in the house 
of Potiphar rather than moulder in an Egyptian 
prison ? Why not enjoy the pleasures of sin for a 
season rather than tend sheep on Sinai ? 

Then the second answer is : Shun the world, -x. 
The monastery slumbers in the valley, the cell lies 
hidden in the mountain-side ; far away let the wild 
world laugh and sing and dance ; come thoii apart 
and in some solitude arched over by the deep blue 
sky, dwell ** with thy weakness and thy God." 

Neither of these answers is the answer of James. 
He says, ** Keep unspotted from the world." The 
words are few, but how full of teaching. Here is 
the danger. It is not that you will be necessar- 
ily immersed in the world. Christian people are 
not often that. But when John Bunyan in his 
prison laid his head on the head of his little blind 



lg2 PURE AND UNDEFILED RELIGION 

daughter and spoke of the rough winds which must 
blow upon her whom he loved so dearly that he 
could not bear that one chill breath should touch 
her, he pictured the trouble with us, "Spotted with 
the world." This is what life does. It makes us 
"sadly wise." Why should Isaac climbing the 
hill so bravely learn that he himself was to be the 
sacrifice ? Why should infancy lose its dimpled 
sweetness, girlhood its chaste purity, boyhood its 
frank fearlessness ? Why must the leaf decay and 
the peach be robbed of its bloom ? " Unspotted 
from the world." How, like the sunbeam, can we 
pass through pollution unspotted ? 

James does much more than raise the question. 
I He answers it. " Keep yourself," he says, using a 
strong word which suggests not a virulent wrench 
by which you unhand temptation and deliver your- 
self once for all, but rather a daily and hourly 
vigilance. How ? That he has already told us. 
By communion with God ; and by compassion for 
t God's creatures. On the divine side, let religion 
dwell in constant fellowship with the Father. On 
the human side, let religion visit the fatherless and 
the widow. Keep your soul pure. Keep your 
heart tender. It is to be noticed that he refuses 
to separate them. They are only different aspects 
of one and the same life. No man will be truly 
benevolent unless he live near to Christ. No man 
can live near to Christ without benevolence. 



PURE AND UNDEFILED RELIGION 1 93 

Now this is true religious service. We return 
to the thought with which we commenced. It is 
not a theological definition, but it is a portrait, 
which rises from these few masterly touches, of a 
really religious life. It lives as ever in '' the great 
Taskmaster's eye." It gives as though in each 
sufferer it saw the Man of Sorrows ; and in each 
wanderer Him who had not where to lay his head. 
It guards itself against spot and blemish with the 
immortal principle of Joseph, '' I cannot do this 
great wickedness and sin against God." 

Time does not affect this picture. It has always 
represented religion. To this day it does so. This 
life of beautiful charity is not religion, but it is, as 
Coleridge says, *' its service and ceremonial." The 
scheme of grace and truth by Jesus Christ *' has 
light for its garment ; its very robe is righteous- 
ness." Beneath the robe, behold the heart at 
peace with God by Jesus Christ our Lord. 

I go further. Did I say that time worked no 
changes in this fair picture ? We lift it into the 
light of eternity, and say that even forever it will 
remain the same. Creed, conduct, character — 
what I believe, what I do, what I am — these shall 
continue to make for me the religious service of 
heaven itself " The throne of God and the Lamb 
shall be in it ; and his servants shall serve him ; 
and they shall see his face and his name shall be 
in their foreheads." 



XV 
BREAD CAST UPON THE WATERS 



Cast thy bread upon the waters ; for thou shalt find it 
after many days. 

— Ecclesiastes ii : i. 



XV 

BREAD CAST UPON THE WATERS 

Of the childhood of Solomon little is told us 



but we are warranted in concluding that his school- 
ing was very largely gathered from the natural 
world. ** He spake of trees, from the cedar tree 
that is in Lebanon, even unto the hyssop that 
springeth out of the wall ; he spake also of beasts 
and of fowls, and of creeping things and of fishes." 
" My book," he could say, alike in early boyhood 
and in later years, *'is the whole creation, lying 
open before me ; wherein I can read, wheresoever 
I please, the word of God." To this education, I 
suppose, we owe it that his writings are so full of 
subtle analogies between the world of nature and 
the world of spirit. His father David had all the 
poet's dehght in the beautiful ; to him '' the stars 
sang, and the sea" ; for him the forest trees roared 
in the blast and the everlasting hills towered 
heavenward in perpetual majesty. "O Lord," he 
would cry, ** how manifold are thy works ! in wis- 
dom hast thou made them all : the earth is full of 
thy riches." Solomon was more of the philosopher 
than of the poet. Life to him was an enigma and 

197 



198 BREAD CAST UPON THE WATERS 

a mystery. It was a riddle to be guessed at, it 
was a problem to be solved. So he went beneath 
the surface on which the eye of his father rested 
with satisfied delight, and looked down into the 
heart of things. 

From this world of nature our text is taken ; and 
I have selected it in order to study with you some 
of the great laws which hold us in their grasp still, 
and in obedience to which our Christian life and 
practice must be pursued. 

I. The first of these, as we readily perceive, is 
The Law of Sowing and Reaping. 

No better illustration can be found in Scripture 
than we have here of the benefit which has accrued 
to us through books of travel in the right under- 
standing of many perplexing passages. The old 
commentator saw in these words a command to 
the husbandman to sow his seed on the face of the 
waters, ''to sow the foaming deep," as one of them 
says, without any hope of a harvest ; and from this 
the lesson was drawn that we must do good al- 
though our good deeds should be manifestly thrown 
away. But an acquaintance with Eastern customs 
has shed new light upon these words, so that now 
we are no longer forced to believe that the Bible 
encouraged such a reckless and unwarranted waste 
either of seed corn or benevolence. The image is 
no doubt taken from the method of sowing pursued 
in countries which are fertilized by irrigation. On 



BREAD CAST UPON THE WATERS 1 99 

the Nile one may still see the boat floating on the 
overflowing waters, in which the sowers stand, fling- 
ing broadcast the seed, which will sink down and, 
when the flood subsides, will germinate in the rich 
alluvial soil beneath. '' Cast thy bread-corn," 
said Solomon, " upon the waters, for thou shalt find 
it after many days." 

There are dark passages in this book of Ecclesi- 
astes, in which the writer seems to have seen no 
better or wiser law in the earth than blind chance. 
But what is chance ? You will have noticed, I have 
no doubt, that the more ignorant and thoughtless a 
person is, the more he attributes what happens to 
luck, good or bad, to accident, and to chance. 
You speak to an untutored savage — I do not neces- 
sarily mean a painted Indian or a Zulu, but possi- 
bly one who will exercise his privileges at the poll 
next week — and chance appears to be his only ex- 
planation of the mysteries of life. You turn from 
him to the man of science and he assures you that 
there is no such a thing as chance. What igno- 
rance calls chance, knowledge declares to be simply 
law in some of its less common and familiar work- 
ings. See how Solomon touches on this great truth 
in this very chapter : " In the morning sow thy 
seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand ; 
for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either 
this or that, or whether they both shall be alike 
good," What does he mean here? What but 



200 BREAD CAST UPON THE WATERS 

that all sowing of seed produces some result. That 
seed which filters through the overflowing waters 
and sinks into the soil may live, or it may die. 
Living it shall be found in the green blade ; dying 
it shall be found in a richer vegetation. In either 
case **thou shalt find it after many days." Now 
here is a law which everyday, with increased 
knowledge and ampler experience, is showing us to 
be universal. Every cause produces some con- 
sequence. Nothing is lost. The ripple on the 
lake, made by the swirl of a passing steamer, will 
go on forever. The disturbance of the atmosphere 
caused by a shotgun fired, will never cease while the 
world lasts. What then is failure ? When the great 
revelation flashes upon us, and we see no longer 
through a glass darkly, I believe we shall discover 
that nothing has failed and become as though it 
never had been. The world grows rich not alone by 
the springing blade, but equally by the roving seed 
that only gives its little life to make the soil more 
fertile. Truth progresses by failure. The blood 
of the martyrs is the seed of the church. Many a 
father has been brought from darkness to light, 
bending over his little child's grave. ''That which 
thou sowest is not quickened except it die." "I," 
said Christ, speaking of his cross, "if I be lifted up 
from the earth, will draw all men unto me." 

2. The second law which is touched upon here, 
is the Law of Profit and Loss. 



BREAD CAST UPON THE WATERS 20I 

As you may have remarked already, I am ren- 
dering the sentence, ** Cast thy bread-corn upon 
the waters," because that is, beyond question, the 
true meaning of the verse. There is, you will see, 
this natural division of our substance ; so much to 
spend and so much to lay by. Here is corn that 
we must live on ; here is corn that we must save 
to sow. The first is bread-corn, the second is seed- 
corn. Now what does Solomon counsel ? Take, 
he says, }^our present livelihood and spend it on the 
future. What if, in your resolve to live and to 
work for eternity, you have less pleasure to-day; 
what if you do not make quite so much money ; 
what if you sacrifice present gratifications — you 
shall find the reward from this hereafter. Time is 
the interest. Eternity is the principal. Why 
throw away your principal in time ? In the days 
of Queen Elizabeth, from many a little busy sea- 
port in the old country, the merchant sent out what 
was called his ''venture." He purchased and 
stocked his ship, paid his crew and commander, put 
all that he had into the speculation ; and then, one 
day, the sailors marched from the church where 
solemn service had been held, to the shore, and so 
launched out into the deep. That merchant was 
a poorer man for his experiment. He lived hardly. 
He clothed his family in rough homespun. But, 
after a lapse of months, perhaps years, one morn- 
ing he heard the guns, the shouts of the sailors. 



202 BREAD CAST UPON THE WATERS 

the voices of eager wives and children ; and, with 
all her sails set and her flags flying, the good ship 
came home again — and he was the richest man in 
the town. Brethren, it is a wide ocean, and "a 
land that is very far off" lies beyond it. But **lay 
up for yourselves treasure in heaven." Live for 
the unseen and eternal ! Let the flush of the in- 
visible daydawn light up your faces, and in your 
eyes let celestial harvests gleam. I know what it 
will cost. I know what men will say. When 
Palissy the potter brought the poor furniture of his 
cottage and thrust it all into the furnace to keep 
the fire up in which his pottery was baking ; and 
when he knelt in the fierce heat, a beggar, was his 
wife wrong to stand, with the hunger-bitten, ragged 
children round her, and charge him with madness 
and with cruelty? But he looked with the eye of 
faith into the flames, and he saw the forms that 
were rare, the colors that were permanent, the rich 
and the beautiful in his workmanship ; and when, 
with nothing else in all the wide world, he drew 
these perfect vessels forth in triumph he was for 
all time the prince peerless in his art So men 
have taken even themselves — *' I count not my life 
dear unto me," the apostle cried, ''so that I may 
win Christ and be found in him." We must give 
to God of our bread-corn. This time which you 
cannot well spare ; this money which you had des- 
tined for some less lasting venture ; this faculty 



BREAD CAST UPON THE WATERS 203 

which the world would fain use in present service 
— ^you must give him all. Cast thy very bread, 
cast thy very self, upon the soil of eternity — ** thou 
shalt find it after many days." 

3. The third law illustrated here, is The Law of 
Greater and Less. 

I cannot wonder that we are overwhelmed some- 
times with the feehng that we must reap at once. 
But, dear brethren, we only need learn to sow 
well. When our Lord was preparing to leave this 
world, there was one to whom he said, ** That which 
thou doest, do quickly " ; but that one was Judas. 
There were eleven to whom he said, rather, "Tarry 
ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with 
power from on high" ; these eleven were the hope 
of Christendom. Across everything which has the 
sentence of death in itself, the words spoken to 
Judas may be written. Across everything which 
throbs with " the power of an endless life " we may 
rather write that other and nobler sentence. In 
the world of politics, how much depends upon 
action this week. A fortnight hence, and all hu- 
man eloquence, wisdom, pleasuring, will be like the 
Israelitish manna when it had been kept too long. 
But when a man starts from this center — " My 
life " — and works outward, each circle, wider than 
the last, is also slower in its response to action. He 
must breathe every moment, or he dies. He must 
eat every few^ hours, or. he starves. He must turn 



204 BREAD CAST UPON THE WATERS 

over his memory every year or two, or he loses. 
He must study in youth, think in early manhood, 
act in his prime, or his life is wasted. Now we 
touch on the widest present world circle, the com- 
mon weal. He must vote, he must decide now, for 
influences which shall tell on his country when he 
has been gathered to his fathers. Ah, but beyond 
that circle I hear the lapping waves of another — it 
is measureless. It is infinite. There he must cast 
his bread and wait many, many days. Yes '* many 
days," even in that higher arithmetic which counts 
a thousand years as one day, and one day as a 
thousand years. 

The most high God cast the bread-corn of re- 
demption on the waters at the gate of Eden, in 
the promise of a Saviour. Four thousand years he 
waited, until the voice of the Saviour cried on Cal- 
vary, ''It is finished ! " Then he found it again. 

This finding of the seed which is sown in time 
v/ill, I suppose, constitute our eternity. ** Whatso- 
ever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." But 
in reference to the immortality of our work, there 
are two conflicting theories. 

(i) The first is that which meets with favor from 
a handful of visionaries, who say : The only im- 
mortaHty we recognize is not immortality of the 
individual, but immortality of his influence. Be 
virtuous, be generous, be pure, and you will live 
again in an increase, in the future, of the virtue, the 



BREAD CAST UPON THE WATERS 205 

generosity, and the purity of the race. Washing- 
ton is immortal in the repubHc ; Alfred of Eng- 
land is immortal in law ; Mozart lives forever in 
strains of music which but for him would never 
have been heard. Now, if the man be inferior to 
his work there might be reason in this. But be- 
cause he is not, because the man is greater than 
his work, and I am more than virtue or benevo- 
lence or purity which I may display, therefore I 
demand an immortality for myself and not for my 
qualities alone. 

(2) The second conception of immortality is the 
Christian. The man is immortal in and with his life- 
work. Resurrection shall be the coming forth of 
each soul in just that form which each soul has 
been preparing for itself in time. But when is this 
resurrection ? It is now ; it is hereafter ; it is al- 
ways. A good man is being even now ''clothed 
upon with his body which is from heaven." What 
is death to him who is thus sowing for eternity ? 
It has no existence! He may "find" now, or a 
year hence, or a thousand years from this time. 
Carey, in India ; Moffat, in Africa ; Judson, in 
Burma, waited many a long year before they made 
a single convert. But now every dusky heathen 
in these lands brought to Christ is part of this im- 
mortality. It is hard, God alone knows how hard, 
to wait, to preach and to pray, and to labor for the 
salvation of souls, and in the evening to cry, "Who 



206 BREAD CAST UPON THE WATERS 

hath beHeved our report." But the end shall 
crown the work. Let the preacher live a myriad 
years, and at length, in some far distant court of 
heaven, find one soul that shall cry, '' You led me 
to Christ" — in that blissful moment, he shall see 
that he had not lived in vain. 

4. The last law to which this verse points, is that 
of Progress through Change. 

'' Thou shalt find it " What ? Not the seed 

indeed, but the growth that has sprung from it 
Christ once preached a sermon on the well-side of 
Samaria to a poor woman. Years passed, and 
Philip the evangelist happened to travel that way. 
To his delight his preaching was welcome. ''The 
people with one accord listened." ''And there was 
great joy in that city." We are left to infer that 
this quickness to hear, and this willingness to listen, 
were the results of Christ's memorable sermon 
preached so long before. I care not to meet their 
poor, imperfect services, their faltering prayers, this 
half-enlightened teaching, this preaching which is 
all unworthy alike of the immortal souls that hear it, 
and of the stupendous theme which it sets forth. 
But these are only the dry outer husk which the 
seed breaks through and casts off. We shall meet 
in heaven not the seed but the harvest ! Shall 
not heaven be a succession of surprises and of joy? 
We sowed " not that body that shall be, but bare 
grain " — poor prayers, faulty examples, stammering 



BREAD CAST UPON THE WATERS 20/ 

appeals. But see! " God giveth it a body as it hath 
pleased him, and to eveiy seed his own body." 

Cast thy bread-corn on the waters. The seed 
shall sink through these ebbing and flowing waves 
of time. They shall fall, divinely guided, into the 
rich soil of eternity which lies everywhere beneath. 
When the waters of this present life shall be drained 
off, when there shall '* be no more sea," then in 
that discovery of the unseen and eternal, we " shall 
find it." 

And with the morn those angel faces smile 
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile. 



XVI 
THE SENTINEL PEACE 



And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, 
shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. 

— Philippians 4 : 7, 



XVI 

THE SENTINEL PEACE 

To US these words are both more and less than 
they were to Paul when he wrote them. They are 
more, because about them has crystallized the rich 
and varied experience of so many centuries. They 
reach us with the added emphasis of a multitude of 
voices setting to their seal that Paul was right and 
that this great utterance of his is true. But, on 
the other hand, they are less to us than they were 
to him, inasmuch as they are so intimately con- 
nected with his own life and with circumstances 
that we very imperfectly recover. A painter who 
has put on canvas some incident suggested in his 
own home — the face of his child, the glow of his 
fireside — has been known to grudge parting with 
his picture. It was so much more to him than it 
ever could be to the purchaser. So is it here. 
Paul was a prisoner in Rome, very much alone, 
treated with scant courtesy (it would seem) by the 
brethren in the imperial capital whom he had so 
earnestly longed to see. Then to him came Epaph- 
roditus, from the church at Philippi, bringing to 
the apostle assistance in his poverty, and, what was 

211 



212 THE SENTINEL PEACE 

more welcome yet, kind words and loving greetings, 
the assurance that he was constantly in the hearts 
and prayers of his friends in the far-off city. This 
was a bright and beautiful contrast to the disquiet 
and disappointment of his life in Rome, and it sug- 
gested, we may suppose, the thought of our text. 
" The peace of God " was the pearl to purchase 
which he had parted with everything besides, and 
here in the Roman prison he drew it forth and 
drank in its calm, restful beauty. Following his 
example, and as though we were his companions 
in the same bonds of the gospel, we will inquire 
into this peace of God which passes all understand- 
ing. The apostle's words will sufficiently reveal to 
us the hidden lustre of the jewel. 

I. Notice, then, as the first thought, that it is 
the peace of God, marked off and enthroned apart 
by this distinction. So accustomed have we grown 
to hear the expression that it needs an effort of the 
mind to arrest it and define just what it means. For 
one thing, it is the peace of God inasmuch as peace 
is one of the divine attributes. A little later Paul 
calls him ''the God of peace." So that when he 
gives us this he really gives us himself For another 
thing, you may remember that peace is his peculiar 
delight. The opening and closing chapters in the 
Bible illustrate this. On the seventh day, with a 
completed creation, God rested from all his work, 
and it was not the day that first saw light or verdure 



THE SENTINEL PEACE 213 

or human life, but only this day that he hallowed. 
The revelation of heaven at the last is a revelation 
of unbroken, tranquil purity. The peace of God 
means, further, that it is from him that peace comes. 
You must start from his throne, the fount and 
source of peace, if you mean to follow the stream 
as it flows down through the ages. The African 
explorer, beginning at the coast and tracing the 
great river upward, soon lost the main stream in 
the tributaries of it, which looked so broad and so 
deep that he was beguiled into following them. 
All peace worthy the name is from God, but to 
know how deep and how wide and how mighty the 
river is you must begin with God himself. Other 
streams are but rivulets in comparison. Before 
long they are lost in the forest or the marsh. But 
the peace which, in the great words of Isaiah, is 
" a place of broad rivers and streams," springs from 
the very feet of **the glorious Lord" himself 

And once more, as peace is God's attribute and 
his delight and owns in him its only true source, so 
is it in the believer as a necessary consequence of 
God's own indwelling. Where God is there must be 
this peace. The great painter leaves his autograph, 
as it were, in the slightest touches on his canvas as 
truly as he does in the more important strokes of 
his brush, and so the calm in the soul, though 
sometimes very brief and apparently accidental, is 
divine. It is God's crowning blessing. What was 



214 THE SENTINEL PEACE 

the salutation with the Jews as they met is our 
benediction, "The peace of God !" 

2. Notice, secondly, that this peace is here pic- 
tured as passing all understanding. There seems to 
be no sufficient reason for reading into these words 
any other meaning than the one which they plainly 
convey on their face. Paul may have had in his 
thought the obvious truth that God's peace passes 
all other peace, that there is none comparable to it. 
But he meant much more. He meant that this 
blessing was one which was not only incomparable 
but also inconceivable. 

Upon this I would remark at once that because 
it passes our understanding God's peace is not 
therefore irrational. A thing may be superhuman 
without being supernatural. A thing may be both 
superhuman and supernatural without being irrecon- 
cilable either with humanity or with nature. These 
two words, God's peace, like great folding doors 
flung wide open, let us into a region which of 
necessity we are impotent to understand. What 
do I really know either of God or of peace ? The- 
ology, of all sciences, is the one that reminds us of 
a child playing with diamonds, incapable as yet of 
estimating the wealth that lies at the heart of each 
lustrous stone. But how can it be otherwise ? 
Would you be willing for your mind, or indeed for 
the loftiest mind in the universe, to be made the 
absolute measure and the final limit of truth ? 



THE SENTINEL PEACE 21 5 

Shall even the telescope of the greatest power com- 
mand us to believe that there are no stars beyond 
its grasp and range ? And when we rise from the 
investigation of the material and turn our thought 
to the spiritual world shall any age claim the last 
word and write ^^ finis " to the right or to the ability 
of the mind to discover fresh truth ? Much more 
irrational, however, than even this would be the 
cissertion that great mysteries such as these two, 
which are linked together in the word " God " and 
the word ''peace," must not have heights which 
no human mind can scale and depths which no 
human mind can fathom. When John Robinson 
launched the Pilgrim Fathers on their venturesome 
voyage to the New World with the assurance that 
there was yet much fresh light to break forth from 
God's word, by those words he bade them set sail 
on another ocean as much broader and nobler than 
the Atlantic as he and his heroic companions were 
broader and nobler than their malignant English 
persecutors. 

The reverse of what Paul here says would be 
irrational indeed. Of all men he would be the last 
to consent to limit the truth of God by the mind of 
his creature. To his fervid faith there was a margin 
of dazzHng splendor to every subject, bright through 
excess of glory. The love of Christ passeth knowl- 
edge. Christ himself is an unspeakable gift. God 
can do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask 



2l6 THE SENTINEL PEACE 

or think. It was the pride and the joy of this 
great soul to match itself with these immeasurable 
thoughts and to fall before them vanquished and 
therefore victor. His triumph consisted in his will- 
ing recognition aHke of his unfitness and of their 
majesty. Let me hasten to add that because it 
passes all our understanding this peace of God is 
not therefore beyond our reach and use. It is not 
like the coin which we cannot spend wisely until 
we know its full value. God does not put us through 
an examination before giving us the right to enjoy 
his gifts. I cannot tell you what life is nor can the 
profoundest thinker of the ages, but none the less 
can I exult in it. Thousands of brave sailors piloted 
their way on the ocean by the pale light of the 
stars, although they knew nothing of their size, their 
elements, or their distance. So is it with the peace 
of God. Before it the understanding flags and 
fails. It travels so far forward that no finite mind, 
however fleet, can keep pace with it or hope to 
bring it within the measurable bounds of our 
thought. But we may throw open our souls and 
let the peace of God flow in and fill the steps of 
life with tuneful breath. For as Bossuet says truly, 
** The heart has reasons that the reason does not 
understand." 

3. This brings us to the third feature in this 
peace. It keeps our hearts and minds. The 
Apostle Paul is now in a state of impassioned 



THE SENTINEL PEACE 21/ 

enthusiasm that personifies every subject which it 
touches. To him peace is a hving, active reaHty. 
Will you notice the character and the extent of the 
part which it is here pictured as playing? 

Its character is described in the one word "keeps," 
better rendered in the Revised version, ''guards." 
Apparently the image which rose to his enraptured 
mind was that of a sentinel marching around the 
tent in which his general rested. Not at all im- 
probable is it that the tramp of the Roman soldier 
as he kept mounted guard over him may have been 
seized and preserved to all time by Paul. How- 
ever this may be, what he meant was that God's 
peace, a sentinel guarding the soul, encircled it 
in a constant march. Tennyson has caught the 
thought when he sings : 

I keep 
Within his couch on earth, and sleep 

Encompassed by his faithful guard, 

And hear at times a sentinel 

Who moves about from place to place, 
And whispers to the world of space, 

In the deep night, that all is well. 

As to the extent of the work which this peace 
does, that is set forth in the words, "your hearts 
and minds." Paul could not say much about the 
sentinel. He passeth understanding. But he did 
know something of the treasure that he guarded. 
We need to remember that no contrast was here 



2l8 THE SENTINEL PEACE 

suggested between the heart as the seat of feeHng, 
and the mind as the sphere of thought. This 
unfortunate distinction no Hebrew would have 
made. The heart was the source, the mind what 
flowed from it. The physical life ; then the life 
of intelligence ; then the personal life, that which 
makes me myself and not another ; the inner life 
and the hidden, which belongs to me and with which 
no stranger intermeddleth — all this is intended by 
the heart. And the mind is that outer life which 
results from the inner. God's peace penetrates to 
the universal chamber and broods over the thought 
which is there, and then it passes out to encircle 
all to which that thought leads. It touches the 
farthest reaching action and the farthest sounding 
word. Try to conceive of the apostle's vivid image, 
the sentinel peace marching with velvet feet around 
the earthly house of our tabernacle, the tent in 
which you have your present home. With noise- 
less step, with form invisible, silent as the dew or 
the sunbeam, this divine guard is always there. 
" For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to 
keep thee in all thy ways." 

4. Our last and crowning thought is that all this 
is done ''through Christ Jesus." Of the life which 
is hid with Christ in God is this true. To believers 
he was writing and of believers he was thinking. 
This, then, is Christian security. 

I have said that such words as these of our text 



THE SENTINEL PEACE 2ig 

must have meant a great deal to Paul which we 
almost inevitably miss. How could he write of 
peace to the Philippians without a personal remem- 
brance guiding his pen ? Imprisoned now in Rome, 
'*a worn and fettered Jew," he has pressed his guard 
into the service and transformed the rough Roman 
into white-robed peace, and his thoughts must per- 
force run back to that other prison, the jail at 
Philippi, in which the inner cell and the chafing 
stocks could not quench his confidence or silence 
his prayers and his praises. A strain from that 
same all-victorious gladness is heard throughout 
this letter which, as has been said, is all summed 
up in two sentences, " I rejoice. . . Rejoice ye." 
Illustrated by his own experience in their city, Paul 
would have this same sentinel peace, who had kept 
his heart and mind in the prison, encircle the be- 
lievers at Philippi too. So he beseeches Euodias 
and Syntyche, two women who had labored with 
him in the gospel, to be of the same mind in the 
Lord. Friction elsewhere dies away when " in the 
Lord " becomes the very atmosphere of their lives. 
Ah, but, better yet than Paul or his converts in 
Phihppi, this peace in Christ Jesus has been exem- 
plified in Christ Jesus himself The poor Roman 
prisoner, indebted to distant friends for ministries 
of money, yet spreading forth his chained hands in 
benediction and invoking peace on his far-off breth- 
ren, giving them out of his abundant poverty a 



220 THE SENTINEL PEACE 

treasure richer than any other the earth could hold, 
finds a nobler parallel in his Master. On the edge 
of that bleak chasm in the depths of which lay 
Gethsemane, as on its farther side rose the cross, 
Christ had made his disciples wealthy beyond words 
to picture, as he said, " Peace I leave with you, my 
peace I give unto you : not as the world giveth, 
give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, 
neither let it be afraid." Brethren, he who has 
Christ has God. The sentinel is none other than 
the Lord Jesus Christ himself. '* He is our peace." 



XVII 

THE WATER OF THE WELL OF 
BETHLEHEM 



And David was then in an hold, and the garrison of the 
Philistines was then in Bethlehem. And David longed, and 
said. Oh, that one would give me drink of the water of the 
well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate ! And the three 
mighty men brake through the host of the Philistines, and 
drew water out of the well of Bethlehem, that was by the 
gate, and took it, and brought it to David : nevertheless he 
would not drink thereof, but poured it out unto the Lord. 
And he said, Be it far from me, O Lord, that I should do 
this : is not this the blood of the men that went in jeopardy 
of their lives ? therefore he would not drink it. These 
things did these three mighty men. 

— 2 Samuel 2j : 14-I'/. 



XVII 

THE WATER OF THE WELL OF BETHLEHEM 

This is an Old Testament ** short story," and the 
verses which we have read tell it all. In the full 
history of David's life as shepherd, soldier, and 
sovereign, the incident finds no place, but here, 
when he speaks his last words, he recalls it. In the 
calm sunset which followed a life of storm and 
stress the remembrance of this splendid deed of 
daring performed on his behalf by the three 
mighty men stood out clear and bright in the 
afterglow which now bathed his earlier days. How 
the Philistines lay between him and Bethlehem, and 
how in his thirst he longed for a draught from the 
well of his boyhood, and how these three warriors 
dashed through the lines of the enemy and brought 
it back to him, and how, refusing to drink of it, he 
poured the water out as an offering to Jehovah. 
Here is a story in four chapters, in the first of 
which we see, 

I. Memory cr e&ting Desir e. "And David longed, 
and said, Oh, that one would give me drink of the 
water of the well of Bethlehem, which is by the 
gate ! " It was harvest time, and the Philistines, the 

223 



^24 THE WATER OF THE WELL OF BETHLEHEM 

traditional foes of Israel, had waited until the fields 
of the Hebrews waved with golden grain, and then 
sweeping down to forage they filled the plain with 
their forces • their beasts were soon laden with the 
ripe wheat, while from the towers of Bethlehem the 
officer in command kept watch. Where David was 
is uncertain, except that it was in some mountain 
fastness where he and his band, outlawed by Saul 
and at strife with all the world besides, were wont 
to hide themselves. David was very human. The 
undying interest which in every age and country is 
sure to be aroused by the mention of his name is 
due to this. His virtues show us ourselves at our 
best, his crimes at our worst ; but he never loses 
that one touch of nature which " makes the world 
kin." And now in this barren limestone cavern, 
with the fiercest harvest heat quivering on crag and 
bush, there came to him " one of those sudden ac- 
cesses of home-sickness which belong to his char- 
acter." He who has never known the feeling him- 
self is to be pitied, either because he has had no 
home worthy of the name, or because he himself is 
not worthy of the home. Perhaps it was when 
pushing from his lips the brackish and muddy water 
which was all that the stronghold could yield that 
by force of contrast he recalled the pure, spark- 
ling draught of the spring at the gate of Bethlehem 
— water so precious that it was afterwards con- 
veyed by costly conduits to Jerusalem. Oh, for 



THE WATER OF THE WELL OF BETHLEHEM 22 5 

a draught of that ! Such memories come to us all, 
and oftener than not they are memories which 
if they sadden our hearts do at the same time 
soften our natures. So the prodigal in the far coun- 
try among the swine, and with only husks to feed 
on, cries, **How many hired servants of my father's 
have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with 
hunger ! " And in our own literary history, Cowper 
receives his mother's portrait, and a flood of mem- 
ories rushes in and overwhelms him as he sighs, 
"Oh, that those lips had language!" and, later, 
another poet, breathing the bracing breath of the 
pine trees, sings : 

I used to think their slender tops 

Were close against the sky : 
It was a childish ignorance, 

But now ' tis little joy- 
To know I'm farther off from heaven 

Than when I was a boy. 

It is safe to say that as David glanced across the 
years of sin and sorrow, the w^ell of Bethlehem 
looked more attractive and its waters to his remem- 
brance were cooler and sweeter than ever they had 
been to his taste when he was a shepherd lad and 
drank of them freely, none daring to make him 
afraid. And so we who are still near the gates of 
life, the portals through which in our first conscious- 
ness we pass to run our race and fight our battle, 



226 THE WATER OF THE WELL OF BETHLEHEM 

are planting memories which will never die. Forget 
them no doubt we shall, as the sailor forgets the 
Bible his mother laid away in his chest, but there 
they are. And the time is almost sure to come 
when the remembrance of them — of the old home, 
of the dear faces, of voices hushed on earth for- 
ever, of early moments of simple faith, and early 
words of childish prayer — we shall cry ** Oh, that 
one would give me drink of the well of Bethlehem, 
which is by the gate ! " 

2. The memory creating desire, desire in its turn 
stimulated devotion. "■ The three mighty men brake 
through the host of the Philistines, and drew water 
out of the well of Bethlehem, that was by the gate, 
and took it, and brought it to David." The long- 
ing for the water was perhaps little more than a 
passing whim, but to these loyal soldiers of his it 
was equivalent to a command. The band of his 
followers originally consisted of " those who were 
in distress, and those who were in debt, and those 
who were discontented." Distress, debt, and dis- 
contentment have often recruited such companies 
of free lances ; but in this instance the innate 
nobleness of David's character, with all its faults 
never grander than in times of trouble, and rising to 
the sublime when face to face with one of the trage- 
dies of life, had called forth all that was best in them. 
This is what nobleness does. It is like some true, 
clear note struck, which as it sounds rouses kindred 



THE WATER OF THE WELL OF BETHLEHEM 22/ 

echoes in unsuspected places. In the presence of 
some sudden display of magnanimity or charity 
men are shamed out of their littleness and mean- 
ness, and a new spirit is created in them, as the 
rough and limited fishermen and peasants of Gali- 
lee, towering up before the priests of Jerusalem and 
loftier far than they, drew forth the unwitting testi- 
mony to the divine power of Christ : " They took 
knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus." 
*' We live by admiration, hope, and love." 

So these three men who are nameless, as the 
details of their daring adventure are also unwritten, 
dashed through the hosts of the Philistines and 
drew the water from the well at the gates of Bethle- 
hem and brought it safely to their captain. All 
we care to know we are told, and that is that 
David's slightest wish it was a joy to them to gratify, 
although it might be at the peril of their lives. 
When the water reached him, was it the water of 
his boyhood ? Perhaps carried in a hot helmet, 
and inch by inch fought for through the scattered 
lines of the foe, it was unlike, indeed, to the cool, 
pure, sparkling draught which had so often re- 
freshed the lips of the shepherd lad keeping his 
father's sheep on those happy fields. And certainly 
it is not always safe for us to revive our early mem- 
ories after long years have gone over us. They, 
like the water from the well, have not improved by 
carrying. You need the little child's lips to say the 



228 THE WATER OF THE WELL OF BETHLEHEM 

little child's prayer, the child's eyes to look on the 
child's toys, the child's heart to prize the child's 
pleasures. I think that the delight which the grand- 
father feels in his grandson's enthusiasm over his 
first achievements, his prowess at the games, his 
skill at his studies, is due in part to the half-pathetic 
feeling that it all represents something which to him 
'will return nevermore. 

But be that as it may, the devotion of these men 
was none the less fine : 

Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs but to do and die. 

We see in it the true love which pours its " oint- 
ment, very precious," over the Master's feet in a 
recklessness of absolute devotion at the very opposite 
extreme to the spirit of hard, unimaginative econ- 
omy which mutters, *' Why was not this ointment 
sold for three hundred pence ? " And the devotion 
is fine because it does not wait for some great thing 
to do. A mother does not suppress her love for 
her child until a crisis demands its display, any 
more than Niagara holds back its waters until some 
prince or potentate comes to look at it. God 
lavishes his love on the meanest flower that blows 
and the smallest creature that breathes. And in 
every instance of devotion — be it human or be it 
divine — that which prompts it is not the worthiness 



THE WATER OF THE WELL OF BETHLEHEM 229 

of the object so much as its own great wealth of 
love. Devotion to his art often led the old painter 
to put his finest work into some petty detail in his 
picture ; and when these rough outlaws found their 
way through the Philistine ranks and brought the 
water, it was not the draught itself, but it was David 
that made them brave to dare and to do. 

3. Memory created desire ; desire stimulated 
devotion ; and then devotion kindled reverence. 
When the wish for the water broke from his lips 
David was suffering, as the sensitive nature does, 
from depression. The shepherd days were the 
happiest his life had seen. Courts and camps had 
brought him only disappointment and chagrin. He 
was homeless now, and this ragged company of 
bankrupt malcontents was a poor substitute for 
earlier dreams and hopes. But when, begrimed 
and bleeding the three heroes burst into his pres- 
ence and placed the helmet full of water from the 
Bethlehem well in his hands, David's true self once 
more stood up in its strength. This was something 
to be proud of indeed ; it was courage, it was cour- 
age inspired by love, love for him ; ah, but it was 
more : it was what we rightly name high-minded- 
ness. And the world is never so far gone in sin, or 
never so deep down in despair, but that it can recog- 
nize that. Notice, then, how at a bound David rose 
to do honor to this deed of true nobleness : " My 
God, forbid it me, that I should do this thing : shall 



230 THE WATER OF THE WELL OF BETHLEHEM 

I drink the blood of these men that have put their 
lives in jeopardy? " Water, water out of the well 
of Bethlehem ? No, it is far more and far more 
precious than that. It is blood, the life-blood of 
my bravest and best ! The genuine worth of a 
thing is not to be estimated at its market price. 
The question is, How much blood has gone to the 
making of it ? how much loss of life has been en- 
tailed in its production ? This is what Tom Hood 
meant when in ''The Song of the Shirt," which 
roused as few things have the conscience of the 
world, he cried, 

O men, with sisters dear ! 

O men with mothers and wives ! 
It is not linen you're wearing out, 

But human creatures' lives ! 

To think of God's price on the innocence which is 
betrayed, and the purity which is sullied, and the 
love which is spurned or held by us so cheap ! 
When the old Roman emperor fed slaves to his 
fishes to gratify his depraved appetite he was only 
one in a long procession of men and women who 
from the days of Cain until now have been indif- 
ferent to the eternal truth that each one of us in 
this great human family is his brother's keeper. I 
say that the sacredness of a thing is to be measured 
not by its face value, but by the life which has been 
given on its behalf. This is the truth which rises to its 



THE WATER OF THE WELL OF BETHLEHEM 23 1 

highest appHcation when Paul pleads with the strong 
and free on behalf of the weak : *' Destroy not him 
for whom Christ died." But it is a truth with as 
many facets as a diamond has, and all are luminous 
with meaning for us. There is the life-blood of 
men of whom the world is not worthy, in the build- 
ing up of our religious liberties. For this Bible, 
as it lies before me, Wycliffe imperiled his life, 
and Tyndale surrendered his. For this right to 
worship in our own way and according to our own 
consciences men went to the stake, else it had 
never been ours. The Declaration of Independ- 
ence, which we hold so lightly, is sacred to me if I 
remember that the men who signed it did so, if not 
in fact yet in the highest reality, in their own blood. 
Nay, this life itself was given to each of us at the 
hazard — perhaps in some cases at the cost — of a 
mother's life. That crimson tinge which David saw 
in the water brought from Bethlehem colors the 
dearest draught which daily we lift to our lips. 
Those who were present at one of the earliest 
church councils felt a strange thrill of reverence as 
into the great hall filed the confessors of this com- 
mon faith, one limping with the seared sinew, 
another bereft of sight, " Men w^ho had hazarded 
their lives for the name of the Lord Jesus Christ." 
The faintest breath, the feeblest whisper, from such 
men was of infinite value — their life-blood had been 
poured into the veins of the young church. 



232 THE WATER OF THE WELL OF BETHLEHEM 

4. And SO — memory creating desire, and desire 
stimulating devotion, and devotion kindling rever- 
ence — the last chapter is reached when reverence 
impels to sacrifice. *' He would not drink it, but 
poured it out unto the Lord." Because he himself 
would not take it, it was not therefore to be wasted. 
In the presence of this splendid exhibition of devo- 
tion David forgot his thirst ; this was a draught 
purer and cooler and sweeter than the well of Beth- 
lehem could give. The water as he held it became 
a sacrament ! No human life was worthy to take it, 
as no transient thirst was worthy to be slaked by it. 
Too good to drink, it was not too good to sacrifice ; 
too precious for self, it was not too precious for 
God, For him, indeed, nothing is too good or too 
costly, and our best only becomes best when it is 
consecrated to him. '' I beseech you therefore, 
brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present 
your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto 
God, which is your reasonable service." 



XVIII 

THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 



Remember them that had the rule over you, which spake 
unto you the word of God ; and considering the issue of 
their life, imitate their faith. Jesus Christ is the same 
yesterday and to-day, yea and forever. 

— Hebrews ij : 7, 8. R. V. 



XVIII 

THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 

The Epistle to the Hebrews is the Epistle of 
contrasts. The unknown writer stood at the part- 
ing of the ways, as one who, by a steep and nar- 
row path, has reached a point where suddenly the 
broad sunlit landscape opened out before him. 
One hand was laid upon the old dispensation, for 
which he had the profoundest reverence ; the other 
upon the new, for which he had the most enthusi- 
astic admiration. There was no opposition be- 
tween the two. The path led to the prospect. The 
law was the schoolmaster to bring to Christ, and 
Christ himself was the end of the law. But how 
great was the difference ! How impressive were 
the contrasts ! In times past God spoke by the 
prophets ; now by his Son. The sacrifices had 
died out upon the altars, because the one sacrifice 
for sin had been offered up once for all. The 
key-word of the Epistle is "better"; and not 
that he loves the old dispensation less, but only 
because he loves the new dispensation more, the 
writer never seems to weary of the music of it. A 
better hope ; a better covenant ; a better sacrifice ; 

235 



236 THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 

a better resurrection ; a better country ; a better 
and an enduring substance. Our text is to be 
found among the brief counsels and injunctions — 
the fragmentary last words of a friend which he 
speaks when ready to depart ; but this same sense 
of contrast is, if possible, stronger than ever before. 
The contrasts themselves, however, are different. 
Not the dispensation alone, but many other things 
as well were changing. The Christian religion 
itself was developing new forces and assuming new 
aspects. The disturbing elements in our religious 
life over which to-day we alternately congratulate 
ourselves and mourn, were present equally in this 
first century of our era. The writer of these words 
was like a man who had with difficulty gained a foot- 
hold on the solid rock, while all about him swirled 
and surged angry, contending waters. He watches 
them as they battle below him, and then with in- 
finite relief he turns to his abiding resting-place. 
"Jesus Christ," he cries, **the same yesterday and 
to-day, yea and forever." 

The points of resemblance between his position 
and our own are so many and so instructive that 
we may well take our stand by the side of this de- 
vout observer, and notice, first, the Passing Influ- 
ence, and then the Permanent Presence revealed 
by our text. 

I. What, then, were the passing influences which 
the author of this Epistle beheld, and on which he 



THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 237 

read the inevitable sentence of change and decay? 
They seem to have been three : the world, certain 
y theological opinions, the Christian ministry — united 
only in this one truth that in them all there were 
elements of transience. 

As to the world of that old era, if we could spare 
the time to examine it we might at first be tempted 
to conclude that it had very little in common with 
our own. But I believe on calmer reflection we 
should come to recognize the fact that after all the 
differences between any two centuries or any two 
countries are less in number and infinitely less in 
importance than are the resemblances. There is 
but one human heart. Human nature does not 
materially change as the centuries roll on ; and 
there has always been a great deal of it in the 
world. I am afraid that we have not yet outgrown 
the feature in the daily life of these old days to 
which our attention is drawn in this chapter. " Let 
your mind be free from the love of money." The 
canker then is the canker now. Call it covetous- 
ness, or selfishness, or worldliness, it resolves itself 
into an inordinate affection for this material life 
and for those things which perish in the using. 
And what concerns us is this one pathetic truth, that 
apostasy has in every age, in every church, yes, in 
every heart, been fed and fostered by nothing so 
much as by an undue love for this present but 
passing world. "All that is in the world "^ — the 



238 THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 

words swing with sullen sound over the graves of 
so many bright hopes which have made shipwreck 
here — *'the lust of the flesh and the lust of the 
eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but 
is of the world. And the world passeth away and 
the lust thereof ; but he that doeth the will of God 
abideth forever." 

A second changing influence the author marked 
in what he calls " divers and strange doctrines." 
Probably the reference is to the insistence by the 
stricter Jews upon traditional distinctions between 
one kind of meat and another, coupled with an 
assurance that abstinence would somehow purify 
the spiritual life, while indulgence would defile it. 
The question, in this special bearing of it, may 
have very little interest for us ; but still, as then, 
the golden sentence of this chapter is needed : " It 
is a good thing that the heart be established with 
grace, not with meat." It is not ritual, it is not 
fasting, it is not a slavish adherence to the letter ; 
no ! but it is grace, the free grace of Jesus Christ, 
the liberty wherewith he maketh us free, which 
builds up Christian lives. And to take a yet wider 
application of these words it is well for us to re- 
member that whatever treasures we may snatch, 
like wreckage from the breaking up of some noble 
ship, out of the currents in which are borne these 
" divers and strange doctrines " which have a charm 
for some of us as they are swept along on the 



THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 239 

eddies of the hour, they can never take the place 
of the rock. At best 

They are but broken hghts of thee ; 
And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

Now we will turn to a third influence to which 
the writer of this Epistle refers, and which was, I 
believe, most deeply impressed on his heart as he 
penned the words of our text. The world was 
passing away. These divers and strange doctrines 
were soon swept by, and out of sight would ere 
long most of them be out of mind. But it was not 
so in this third illustration of human transience. I 
mean the Christian leaders of that time. Faithful 
pastors who have been with us in our joys and in 
our sorrows until our fortunes seemed bound up in 
them ; and. faithful preachers whose words gained 
an added eloquence from their lives, what shall we 
say as to them ? 

Notice, then, these three words which, like three 
strands in a rope, bind every Christian congrega- 
tion to the honorable succession of its ministers. 
These words are. Remember ; Consider ; Imitate. 

(i) Remember them that had the rule over you. 
The church was young at this time, but it was not 
too young to have its graves ! Already memory 
had begun her reign. The heirlooms which are so 
rich to-day as we look back over the history of 
Christianity were even then accumulating. For 



240 THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 

two reasons the Christian minister is said here to be 
worthy of remembrance. He has "had the rule." 
During his life he demands and deserves, as we 
learn from a later verse, obedience. The church 
has always been on the outlook for leaders, and 
she has always been glad to follow them. ** Not as 
being lords over God's heritage, but as examples to 
the flock," Christian ministers need to be Christian 
generals. And he is a poor general who does not 
know how to make his powers to guide and organ- 
ize and lead to victory felt. Ah, but the true leader 
gains his influence and lives in a golden glory of 
memory for one reason supremely. He has "spoken 
unto us the word of God." The man with a mes- 
sage from his Master may be weak in himself, but 
he is mighty through God. We look not at the 
poor paper or fading ink of some precious auto- 
graph, but on the autograph itself Our lives and 
leadership are current coin if they bear the image 
and superscription of the King of kings and Lord 
of lords. 

(2) Then consider the issue of their lives. Per- 
haps the writer is thinking of the flash of the axe 
or the fierce flare of the flames, or the gleam of the 
lion's white teeth and angry eyes, but I think he 
was rather looking forward of all this. It was not 
the martyrdom with which many of these Christian 
pastors sealed their fate, so much as something 
which lay beyond that. " Consider earnestly " 



THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 24 1 

what the leadership of the leader was worth to him- 
self, where the preacher's word led him. You see 
how he is preparing his readers for his other and 
better thought. His lips are impatient to mention 
the name which is above eveiy name. So he says, 
(3) "Imitate their faith." It is easy to bask in 
sunny memories ; it is easy from some indolent 
vantage-point to watch the martyr leap from the 
blood-stained sand of the arena to the embrace of 
his Lord, but this is not enough. "Imitate" — 
what ? Their creed ? No. Their actions ? No. 
This would be to destroy all originality either of 
conviction or of conduct. Think for yourselves ! 
Live your own life ! But imitate their faith ; 
drink into their spirit. Ah, dear friends, the one 
thing which lives as we bury our Christian dead 
out of sight, or as we part with faithful pastors and 
leaders, is the spirit of their ministry. The ala- 
baster box of ointment is indeed crushed ; but if 
the ointment itself has been poured out in honor 
of our dear Lord, the fragrance of it lingers yet. 

I ask them whence their victory came, 

They with united breath 
Ascribe their conquest to the Lamb, 

Their triumph to his death. 

So by a rising scale the writer has led us from 
a passing world to passing currents of religious 
thought, and thence up to this long, this honorable, 

Q 



242 THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 

this sublime procession of the Christian ministry. 
All these are transient. Now, the step is a very 
short one. 

2. The Permanent Presence. ''Jesus Christ is 
the same yesterday and to-day, yea and forever." 
The cast of the sentence is picturesque, but it is 
not necessarily precise. The ''yesterday" in the 
writer's mind may have been the time of Christ's 
earthly life, with the morning light falling on the 
stable of Bethlehem and the home of Nazareth ; 
and with the noonday splendor resting on the tri- 
umphs of miraculous power and gracious speech ; 
and with the twilight, sombre and tragic, gathering 
about the garden and the cross. If this be so, then 
the " to-day " to which he alludes will be the glory 
of Christ's present enthronement. Then he is the 
same as he was on earth — "this same Jesus." 
Stephen saw him in enraptured glimpses at his 
martyrdom, and Saul of Tarsus beheld him at his 
conversion, and John from the exile on Patmos. 
Unchangeable still he will be " unto the ages." 
" Forever ! " What is certain is that the words 
declare Christ to be eternally the same. Now will 
you think of this for a moment? The law of this 
visible universe, written on mountain and plain, on 
every breaking wave and bursting blossom, is prog- 
ress through change. The same law undoubtedly 
holds in the universe of thought. Our systems of 
philosophy and of theology have often to be 



TkE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 243 

broken up and made over again. Our thinking 
stagnates like the Dead Sea unless some river Jor- 
dan of healing life pours into and passes through 
it. From James, slain with the sword, to the last 
volunteer for missionary service our ministry moves 
on in a pauseless, unbroken, continuous train. But 
meanwhile — "from before the foundation of the 
world " until now, and forward through ah the 
ages — Jesus Christ is the same. Why? The an- 
swer comes back instantly from this very Epistle : 
'* Unto the Son God saith. Thy throne, O God, is 
forever and ever, a sceptre of righteousness is the 
sceptre of thy kingdom. Thou art the same and 
thy years shall not fail." Read the law which un- 
derlies these great utterances. What does it say ? 
Why, it says that God has put into the heart of 
everything that is imperfect this principle of change, 
into our fair earth, into our eager thinking, into our 
honored ministiy. At our peril do we arrest the 
current of wholesome progress which sweeps through 
these. But that which is perfect changes never, v 
Listen : " Being made perfect he became the author 
of salvation unto all them that obey him." "Per- 
fect" remember, not in spite of but by means of 
his agony and bloody sweat, his cross and passion. 
"Perfect through suffering." This was what Christ 
himself declared : "The third day I shall be per- 
fected ... for a prophet cannot perish out of Jeru- 
salem " Perfected by perishing. The author of 



^44 THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 

this Epistle to the Hebrews saw the atonement of 
which the old dispensation with a hundred voices 
prophesied, fulfilled, completed, perfected, in the 
death of Christ, taking away the sins of the world. 

So we come upon something which is unchange- 
able. Here let us remain rooted and grounded in 
three thoughts suggested naturally by our text. 

(i) First, Christ is the unchangeable leader. The 
church must be aggressive, but in every forward 
movement it must listen to the command of the 
great Captain. *' Press where you see my white 
plume wave amid the ranks of war." If there is 
a march in which, as of old, Jesus does not go be- 
fore his disciples, it is because his disciples have 
lost their way. We hear much of new methods of 
reaching men. Well, if they all center about 
Christ. If he leads us into these broader fields we 
can safely follow. Christ has often waited for us, 
as he did for his disciples on the shore of Galilee. 
He is waiting now in dark places of the earth, in 
the dens of our great cities, in regions remote from 
our ordinary church life and to reach which we 
shall have to break down stubborn walls of preju- 
dice and sloth. But we are bound to follow him, 
as Luther did in the Reformation, when Christ led 
him out of the monastery cell ; and as Wesley did 
when Christ led him from the decorous dullness of 
the parish church to the open air when the gospel 
had to be preached to the unchurched multitude. 



THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 245 

(2) Then, secondly, Christ is the unchangeable 
message. By '* the word of God " in our text we 
know that what is meant is this : Christ is God's 
final word to this great world. Calvary is all that 
God has to say as to our human sin and as to his 
divine salvation ; and the empty sepulchre is all 
that God has to say as to the new and risen life ; 
and Bethany, with its visions of an ascending Lord, 
is all that God has to say as to heaven and as to 
the second coming without sin unto salvation. Men 
never weaiy of listening to this message. The 
other day in the city of Geneva they opened rever- 
ently the chest in which was preserved the violin 
of Paganini, and called the most skillful performer 
living to touch its chords afresh ; and as he did so 
the old music poured forth sweet and stirring. Ah, 
brethren, the fingers of apostles and martyrs may 
no longer play on this matchless instrument, but 
the chords shall not fail to vibrate to the music of 
salvation if we will but hold ourselves loyally to 
the score written by the divine hand — the word 
of God. 

(3) And finally, more wonderful still, Christ is not 
only the unchangeable leader and unchangeable 
message, but he is also the unchangeable power. 
There is indeed an historic Christ ; and it is neces- 
sary to-day to insist upon it that he is the basis of 
Christianity. The apostles may have been de- 
ceived ; but they were not themselves deceivers. 



246 THE PASSING AND THE PERMANENT 

They believed in the actual life of which they had 
themselves been the eye-witnesses. You cannot 
get rid of the historical element in Christianity and 
yet retain one page of this New Testament intact. 
You cannot do so unless first you dismiss the evan- 
gelists with their simple, artless story, and then that 
great apostle whose whole teaching was built up on 
the conviction, " Last of all he was seen of me also, 
as of one born out of due time." If we do not 
linger continually about these holy fields trodden 
centuries ago by His blessed feet, it is not that we 
do not beheve in them. But it is because we show 
our faith in the spring far up the mountain-side by 
launching out on the broad river which has flowed 
from it. The historic Christ is the living Christ. 
He is with us. He is the Christ of our history, he is 
the Christ of our homes, he is the Christ of our hearts. 
We are here because Christ is here. "Where 
Christ is, there is the church." It is he who builds 
the church, it is he who gathers around him the fel- 
lowship of his followers, it is he who inspires us 
with our message, it is he who to-day as much as 
yesterday thrills human souls with the fulfillment 
of his promise : ** Lo, I am with you alway, even 
unto the end of the world." 

Star unto star speaks light ; world unto world 
Repeats the password of the universe, 
The name of Christ. 



XIX 

SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SERVICE 



But none of these things move me, neither count I my 
life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with 
joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord 
Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God. 

— Ac is 20 : 24. 



XIX 

SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SERVICE 

Surrounded by the elders of the Ephesian 
church, who had come here at his bidding, Paul 
stood on the seashore in the harbor of Miletus and 
spoke these words. This hasty interview with his 
friends was possible only while the ship bound for 
Tyre lay at anchor in the offing, so that we may 
say that the stay at Miletus was a parenthesis in 
his voyage, and the address to the elders was a 
parenthesis in the stay at Miletus, and — which is 
the point of special interest to us now — these words 
are themselves a parenthesis in the address itself 
The main thought we recover by omitting the verse 
from which our text is taken and that which pre- 
cedes it and reading then : ''And now, behold, I 
go bound in the spirit unto Jerusalem not knowing 
the things that shall befall me there, and now, 
behold, I know that ye all, among whom I have 
gone preaching the kingdom of God, shall see my 
face no more." 

The strong feeling in these verses and in the 
parenthesis of our text is, however, the same. Such 
a Hfe as this which Paul was now leading was .a 

249 



250 SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SERVICE 

checkered course, composed of certainties and un- 
certainties. Not knowing what should befall him, 
he yet knew that these brethren would see his face 
no more ; not knowing the things which should 
befall him save this — spoken with a certain pathetic 
humor — that in every city bonds and afflictions were 
in store for him. He was not sure of sunshine, but 
as to the shadows he was quite sure of them. The 
one certainty of his life now and in Jerusalem and 
on to the end was this element of suffering. 

Out of this consideration rose the loftier thought 
which found utterance in our text, '' But none of 
these things move me, neither count I my life dear 
unto myself, so that I might finish my course with 
joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the 
Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of 
God." We do justice to the supreme considera- 
tion of the whole life and ministry of the apostle 
only when we see here a description of successful 
Christian service. This description was never truer 
than it is to-day, and we shall do well to study the 
secret, the aim, and the inspiration of such a min- 
istry as Paul lived out in the first century and as in 
the nineteenth may be lived out by us. 

I The secret of successful service. There are 
many ways of reading the first clauses of this verse. 
The words, '' None of these things move me, neither 
count I my life dear unto myself," picture so graph- 
ically the apostle's temper that we almost resent 



SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SERVICE 25 I 

any change. The Revised version, running the 
two clauses into one, reads, *' But I hold not my 
life of any account as dear unto myself" And 
whichever rendering we choose, the thought is 
practically the same. '' My Hfe " — it is with this 
that each one of us is most interested. A man 
may not have much else, but anyhow he has a life, 
a poor thing, perhaps, but his own. You may sell 
him into slavery, you may immerse him in business, 
you may distract him with cares, but these minutes 
and hours and years are, after all, not yours but his. 
And in every life there come times when the soul — 
the self — in the man thrusts lesser things aside, as 
the strong swimmer flings the salt waves off and 
dashes the spray from his eyes and rises to look 
the blue sky overhead full in the face. Such times 
we should encourage. They are indispensable for 
us if we are to do our best work. A man in a huge 
factory is tied down to just one thing. He must 
keep fingers and eyes fastened on the one little bit 
of machineiy for which alone he is responsible. 
The tyranny of this petty concentration becomes 
sometimes intolerable. He does well, when that 
feeling of weary disgust comes on him, to throw 
his few inches of task work aside and, instead of 
keeping at it, to go through the whole factory 
Let him see the great completed machines of which 
his little piece forms what may seem an insignificant 
part, and learn that in truth it is not insignificant, 



252 SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SERVICE 

but essential. Life is indeed made up of trifles ; 
ah, but life itself is no trifle. The boy at school 
bound down to moods and tenses needs the inspira- 
tion which comes to him when the master opens 
the great Latin poem and reads in free translation 
some splendid passage. The pupil beating out the 
scales must be relieved, now and again, by hearing 
what that practice amounts to when patience has 
her perfect work in Mozart or Mendelssohn. 

There are, then, two ways of looking at a life of 
perpetual service. The first concerns itself chiefly 
with its incidents. And perhaps we do not suffi- 
ciently consider that to all true men and women 
serving their own generation by the will of God 
this is just what life is : a succession of petty and 
often irritating details. The heroic moments are 
few. The stretches of far-reaching sand before the 
green palm trees and the cooHng well come in 
sight are many. Paul is no more unconscious of 
the incidents than are any of us. They are not of 
a nature to be ignored. "Bonds and afflictions" 
are to be met and surmounted day by day. But 
he says, "I make account of nothing"; "these 
things do not move me." There are pastors who 
take careful account of every bell which they ring 
and every prayer which they offer in their ministry, 
and so they never allow themselves to rise above 
the arithmetic table. They seize some annual op- 
portunity for recounting the minutiae of their service, 



SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SERVICE 253 

and too often they do this with the unconfessed 
purpose to evoke the admiration of their people. 
Paul asked for no admiration and neither did he 
ask for any compassion. Pity or admiration seems 
out of place in the lives of the men who die daily. 
Better, far better, is it to look at life in its entirety. 
These things do not move me. They go to make 
up my life, and what shall I say about that ? " Nei- 
ther count I my hfe dear unto myself, so that I 
might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, 
which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify 
the gospel of the grace of God." It is as though 
he had said that his main ambition was not to live 
out his life, but only to carry through his ministry. 
Here is a new ideal ; alas that it should to so many 
persons in our own country and all the world over 
be still new. The savage had his conception of 
life, and it was the conception of self-indulgence. 
The Roman had his, and it was the conception of 
self-aggrandizement. The Greek had his, and it 
was the conception of self-culture. The Christian 
conception, rising clear up into the heavens, was 
that of self-sacrifice. Jesus Christ is the great 
model of self-sacrifice, and to-day, as Napoleon 
said, millions will die for him. Let me add, in one 
word, that the influence of any Christian ministry 
is to be measured by this. Men and women will 
bow before the power of a life of complete, wiUing, 
unstinted, self-sacrifice. 



254 SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SERVICE 

2. The aim of successful service. The feeling 
with which the innumerable details of a life of 
service is regarded is not, let us understand, a feel- 
ing of indifference, and still less is it a feeling of 
contempt. Because the workman does not pause 
to count the tale of bricks he is not scornful of 
them ; each one goes to the building of the pyra- 
mid. Every moment in a good man's life and 
every incident in it falls into its place, and, like the 
tramp of each soldier, swells the music of the 
march. A man may refuse to take stock now, but 
this is only because he expects to take stock in 
another and more impressive day of account here- 
after. Incompleteness may distinguish his life for 
the present just for this reason. Here are two very 
noble aspects of life. . 

First, life as a course. To Paul this was a familiar 
thought and readers of his Epistles know how great 
a favorite it was with him. The race of life ! As 
he spoke now the great theatre of Miletus must 
have been full in view — its ruins still rise among 
the sands — and he very likely caught his image 
from it as just before he caught it from the rigging 
of the ship in which he was sailing. Here he says 
that he heeded not the faces thronging the race 
course if only he might win the goal at the end of 
it. Was he the preacher ? Among them he had 
gone preaching the kingdom of God (ver. 25). 
Was he the pastor? From house to house for 



SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SERVICE 255 

three years he had ministered to them (ver. 20). 
Was that all ? No. Preaching and visiting them, 
he had never lost sight of his supreme ambition, 
*'that I might finish my course." The man in the 
ministry is more than the ministry ; the self in the 
preacher is more than the sermon. This man has 
a race to run and a course to cover. The true 
minister does not lose sight of himself. He refuses 
to be merged in any body of men among whom he 
may happen to be numbered. He is a citizen and 
he will often insist upon his obHgations to the com- 
munity, but he will utterly refuse to sink himself in 
his citizenship. "We owe allegiance to the State, 

but " He is in a local church, but he is more 

to himself than any local fellowship. He can do 
without a church sooner than he can do without a 
soul. He has certain great doctrines to set forth, 
but he is greater even than are they. " Take heed," 
Paul wrote to Timothy, " unto thyself and unto thy 
teaching." The man must come first. 

Thou must be true thyself 

If thou the truth would' st teach : 

Live truly, and thy life shall be 
A great and noble speech. 

"Religion," as Jeremy Taylor says, "is rather a 
divine life than a divine knowledge." I can go 
out of the country and out of the church, but I 
cannot go out of myself ! 



2S6 SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SERVICE 

Then, as another aspect of hfe, it is a ministry. 
** My course . . . my ministry." We must guard 
against letting any one class in the community or 
any one vocation among all the occupations in 
which we engage claim an exclusive right to this 
great word, ** ministry." To minister is to serve, 
and, as Milton told us in his blindness, " He also 
serves who only stands and waits." Adolph Monod, 
on his deathbed, could only gather about him a 
little circle of friends to whom to speak of divine 
things, but those who listened bore witness that 
never did he speak with such power and eloquence. 
'* My life is my ministry," the dying preacher said, 
" and I will exercise it till my latest breath." The 
ministry of the Christian holds all the world as its 
parish, and no place is too humble or too remote 
to be its pulpit. 

But some time the course must lie all behind the 
racer, not another step to be run ! and the ministry 
even of the sick-room and the deathbed is finished, 
not another breath to be drawn ! That is the point 
on which, without any cessation, the mind of Paul 
is always fastened, " that I might finish my course, 
and my ministry." These two grand views of our 
Hfe — as a race to be run, as a ministry to be car- 
ried through — do not close in any uncertainty, they 
do not vanish in thin air. See, yonder is the fixed 
goal and the racer is touching it at last. Listen, 
by and by you shall Hsten only to silence ; the 



Successful christian service 257 

heart will beat no more, the ministry is finished. 
And this conception of the successful completion 
alike of the race and the service must give us our 
constant aim. 

3. The inspiration of service. Very briefly, we 
follow the words of our text in order to learn what 
this is. 

First, this ministry had been " received from the 
Lord Jesus." Paul had taken his marching order 
from the Commander himself " Rise and stand 
upon thy feet, for I have appeared unto thee for 
this purpose, to make thee a minister and a wit- 
ness both of these things which thou hast seen, and 
of those things in the which I will appear unto 
thee." And not alone this, which made him so 
confident in his course, that he was *'an apostle 
not of man neither by man, but by Jesus Christ 
and God the Father," but there was also the ex- 
ample of his Master. Christ himself might have 
spoken our text. He did live it. And so it is in 
this very discourse to the elders at Ephesus that 
Paul recalls a familiar sentence not to be found in 
the Gospels, " Remember the words of the Lord 
Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than 
to receive." 

And, second, this ministry was all summed up 
in this one mighty message, ** to testify *the gospel 
of the grace of God." To testify — the word was 
much in his mind just then and he used it three 



258 SUCCESSFUL CHRISTIAN SERVICE 

times. "The Holy Ghost testified that in every 

city " ; and as for himself, he was *• to testify the 

gospel," to testify ** repentance toward God and 
faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ." What a wel- 
come, what an inspiring message ! How it rises 
above the multitude of petty interests with which 
men are concerning themselves, as above the chatter 
on board a great ship one catches now and again 
the thunderous tones of the Atlantic. Brethren, 
this is the message which the world needs, and no 
Christian runs his course or fulfills the ministry of 
his life unless by word or example or spirit he 
takes up his share in delivering it. 

Years ago, on the seashore of a busy harbor, 
these words were spoken by an obscure Jew on his 
way to persecution, suffering, and to death ; spoken 
to a little company of men still more obscure than 
he. The seaport, with its boats and vessels ; the 
docks, with their merchandise ; the town, with its 
crowded interests ; the vast theatre, with its throng 
and plaudits — they are only pale ghosts now, memo- 
ries which live, if they live at all, because once in 
the midst of them the eternal love of God, the gos- 
pel of his grace, was preached by that obscure Jew 
to that obscure company. It is the gospel which 
endures ; it is in preaching it that we find our 
immortality ; it is in living it out before the world 
that we make ''full proof of our ministry." 



XX 

THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR 
OF CHRIST 



For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is 
able to succor them that are tempted. 

— Hebrews 2 : i8. 



XX 

THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR OF CHRIST 

The earliest drift of doubt in reference to the 
person of Christ was in the direction of a denial 
of his humanity. This bright, fair vision of the 
evangelists was only a vision. The Christ of the 
Gospels was too good to be a man. The opposite 
extreme succeeded to it. His divinity was then 
questioned, and the story of his life being accepted, 
it was affirmed that he was too intensely human 
to have been divine. In the verse before us the 
Avriter is dealing with the first of these errors. He 
pictured Christ as a faithful and merciful high 
priest. Then was it not essential that he should 
be human as well as divine ; man as well as God ? 
The priest must be one chosen from among men. 
He must be ''faithful" as toward God, but as 
toward men he must be ''merciful" ; "A faithful 
high priest in things pertaming to God " ; " A mer- 
ciful high priest " in order " to make reconciliation 
for the sins of the people." Let us remember that 
while the high priest was indeed the type of the 
purest and hoHest man, still he was human. Re- 
rnove him from the plane of humanity, and he 

261 



262 THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR OF CHRIST 

ceases to affect us in our sense of human need. 
There is a sympathy which even the worst of men 
can give to his brother man, better than the most 
exalted archangel before the throne. And, dear 
brethren, is it not so that we come to know the 
divine power in Christ, through first knowing the 
human ? He who is called '* Wonderful, Counsel- 
lor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The 
Prince of Peace," comes to us with the announce- 
ment, first, of his perfect humanity. " Unto us a 
child is born, unto us a son is given." 

Not in majesty supernal, sitting easy on a throne ; 
Dealing sorrow out to others, with no sorrows of his own. 

No ; but *' in all points tempted like as we are, yet 
without sin." This is the line of thought pursued 
from the fourteenth verse on to our text ; a line of 
thought which I venture to sum up in the assertion 
that the temptation of Christ was essential to his 
rendering that sympathy and succor which we so 
sorely need. You will notice that this last verse 
falls naturally into two divisions : first, " He himself 
hath suffered being tempted" ; second, '* He is able 
to succor them that are tempted." We will con- 
sider these in the order in which they come. 
I. " He himself hath suffered being tempted." 
Believing, as we have said, that faith in the man 
Christ Jesus is the first step toward faith in the 
God Christ, we appeal against whatever has a 



THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR OF CHRIST 263 

tendency to make that humanity of his unreal. His 
was not only human nature, but our human nature. 
We are to think, in conceiving of the earthly life of 
Jesus, not of Adam as he was first created, but of 
weak and sorrowing men and women as they gath- 
ered to Christ in Capernaum or Nazareth or Samaria. 
The Adam of Eden would have repelled them ; he 
would have been so utterly unlike to themselves. 
But let us say at once, and boldly, that the attract- 
ive power in Christ centered primarily in this : "We 
have not an high priest which cannot be touched 
with a feeling of our infirmities." 

In trying to realize this we may think, first, of 
the common range of human requirements. Jesus 
was subject to them. He hungered in the wilder- 
ness of Judea; he thirsted beside the well at Sychar; 
he was worn out with fatigue when he lay in the 
tossing fisher-boat fast asleep. Night after night 
wrapped him in its gloom when he had no house to 
which to retire and no pillow on which to lay his 
head. A wanderer in the forest or on the moun- 
tain, he saw the foxes slink into their caverns and 
the birds fold their wings in their nests, but he 
himself was homeless. His companions were not 
men of noble character or fine accomplishments. 
With the world's scholarship and art, with its 
poetry and culture, he had to the last no dealings. 
But rough fishermen and simple artisans followed 
him, and although they must continually have 



264 THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR OF CHRIST 

wounded his exquisite sensibility through blunt 
ignorance, yet no word, and scarcely even a sigh, 
escaped his lips to tell them so. 

Rising higher, we shall understand what a trial 
his humanity was to him if we remember that 
Christ possessed the feelings of the noblest human 
soul. His was the psalm of life, but set in a higher 
key than any other had attained to. He loved 
and hated, he sorrowed and rejoiced, he scorned 
and welcomed, he moved along the whole wide 
range of human sensibilities, just as we do. Even 
that sense of confusedness which comes over all 
true natures at times when we see the weakness 
which is the child of sinfulness in its turn be- 
coming the parent of guilt, and when all the 
foundations of the earth seem to be out ot 
course, and when the perplexed spirit stands like 
the rock in the midst of counter-currents, which 
swirl and break upon it — even that feeling he ap- 
peared to have shared, in common with all the men 
of whom the world is not worthy. 

Now pass on from this cursory glance at the life 
of our Lord, to remark that temptation was one 
inevitable consequence of possessing a nature such 
as this. We must beware of linking in the thought 
of sin as essential to the thought of temptation. 
Temptation primarily means just two things : first, 
a nature capable of trial ; secondly, trial applied to 
that nature. Failure is not necessary and, indeed, 



THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR OF CHRIST 265 

in a perfect nature would be impossible. It is as 
in the case of fine music, to which I suppose also 
two things are necessary, the delicate instrument 
and the skillful player. You are to think of Christ 
as the instrument, and of the world as the player. 
Now the mere fact that Jesus had this human nature 
involved temptations. You know how a man of 
coarse constitution will pass unmoved through trials 
from which one of finer organization will recoil in 
exquisite pain. Nerves will quiver in him of which 
the first is utterly unconscious. The world played 
on Christ as it played on none other. There was 
more in him exposed to its bitter blast. If any of 
you had a child so finely constituted as Jesus, you 
would learn to pray God to take that child to himself. 
Life, in its rough battle, life, in its heaving breakers, 
life, in its rude unfeelingness, life, in its vulgar coarse- 
ness, would have such an almost demoniac power 
to torment that fair, sweet being. I cannot look on 
a tropical flower transplanted to our hothouses, or 
on a foreign singing bird caged in our homes, or on 
a lion shut in behind bars, without a feeling of sorrow, 
which in the case of a human being would amount 
to indignation. Just think of this pure and perfect 
nature turned homeless and friendless into a world 
which had grown old in sin, and left then to its 
tender mercies. 

Then this temptation must have been one long, 
unbroken suffering. We are apt to forget that 



266 THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR OF CHRIST 

every great effort, whether intellectual or spiritual, 
in this world, is of necessity attended with pain. 
You listen to some noble singer, pouring his whole 
soul into his part in the oratorio of "The Mes- 
siah " — such men are rare, I know, but perhaps 
once in your lifetime you may hear a man who 
feels what he sings — that exercise is to him suffer- 
ing. You are held spellbound by some orator, deal- 
ing with the highest themes, standing between the 
living and the dead and sublimely unconscious of 
his work ; that appeal often means pain. It is not 
the fear of failure, in the one instance, it is not the 
sense of unworthiness in the other. In both cases 
it is a fine nature doing its finest work. So was it 
with Christ. "He suffered being tempted." His 
holy nature was incapable of evil, but it bent and 
trembled under the bitter and malignant blasts of 
sin, as a tree, deep rooted, bends and trembles 
under the storm. Had it been less firmly struck in 
the soil it must have yielded and fallen. Ask 
yourself, then. Whence came the suffering of Jesus ? 
The only adequate answer is, From the essential 
features of our humanity. The more perfect the 
human nature, the more intense and exquisite the 
pain. Because he was human as none other, there- 
fore he also suffered as none other. Had he been only 
human he must have yielded to sin, for there is no 
man living that sinneth not. But had he been not 
human at all, then he could not have suffered, and 



THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR OF CHRIST 267- 

his earthly Hfe would have been a mere mask, a 
semblance of earnestness with no passionate tragedy 
behind it. " We have not an high priest which 
cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmi- 
ties ; but was in all points tempted like as we are, 
yet without sin." 

2. Pass on to the second assertion : *' He is able 
to succor them that are tempted." 

We must turn now from that solitary figure of a 
suffering Saviour to consider those to whom and 
for whom he came. ''Them that are tempted." 
Now when you contrast Christ who could fearlessly 
say, "The prince of this world cometh and hath 
nothing in me," with a mere man, groaning, " O 
wretched man " there may seem to be one broad 
distinction between the two which makes true sym- 
pathy and succor impossible. The one is incapable 
of sin, the other by nature is incapable of sinless- 
ness. The apostle evidently holds the contrary. 
He exults in the perfection of Christ's ability to help 
us, and he bases that ability on two assertions : 
Jesus is ''touched with a feeling of our infirmities," 
which means sympathy ; Jesus is "yet without sin," 
which means succor. I ask your attention, then, 
to three points. 

(i) In order to Christ's sympathy and succor it 
was not essential that he should sin. We can only 
understand what temptation meant, in the case of 
our Saviour, by studying at greater length than is 



268 THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR OF CHRIST 

possible now, what happened to him in the wilder- 
ness. Briefly, however, he there met the three 
great forces of temptation before which you and I 
fall : "The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, 
the pride of life." His perfect human nature recog- 
nized the full power of each of these. He felt 
how natural it would be to command the stones 
to be made bread, how fascinating was the pros- 
pect of ruling over all the kingdoms of the world, 
how grand the confidence that, casting himself down 
from the height, angel hands would bear him up. 
He realized what it was for three mighty temptations 
to rush in and sweep through the channels provided 
for them in any human being. He had the desires for 
sustenance, for sovereignty, for security which were 
appealed to in these attacks of the tempter. So 
have we. Remember, there is no sin in having 
these. The sin lies entirely in their abuse. To 
take food was right, but not to take food at the 
instigation of the devil. To rule was right, but 
not to rule at the sacrifice of obedience to God as 
supreme. To trust in heaven was right, but not in 
defiance of heaven's promises. Christ in suffering 
being tempted saw the full force of rightful passions 
misdirected. This pained him, this kindled his com- 
passion, this gave purpose and power to his help. 
" He was in all points tempted like as we are." 

(2) But I go further. Sin is not essential, I have 
said, to sympathy and succor ; but only that one 



THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR OF CHRIST 269 

knows the force of sin mastering those channels in 
our nature which God has first of all formed. Let 
me add, sin is actually antagonistic to sympathy 
and succor. Bring to me any man who is sorely 
tempted, I will show you two extremes to which he 
will look in vain for either of these. The first is 
the extreme of sheer ignorance. The evil of classes 
lies just here. The rich do not know what it is to 
be poor, the influential have no acquaintanceship 
with weakness, the master not often thinks of himself 
as also a man. This stupid, wicked ignorance once 
carried into religion does more to make a poor sinner 
bitter and mad than anything else. These people 
professing to be Christians live, he says, at all events 
in their professions, away up there in another 
world, encircled by another atmosphere. 

Then the opposite extreme is utter callousness, 
coming from thorough degradation. " What is this 
sympathy, what is this succor? Why should you 
be better than your fathers ? You are in a world 
that cheats and lies, a world of profligacy and in- 
temperance, a world of rivalry and rudeness — if 
you are so mighty particular you had better get 
out of the world. But if you stay in Rome, do as 
the Romans do." I know that novelists and poets 
would have us think that sin calls forth sympathy 
from other sinners. I do not believe it. Charles 
Dickens was right, in one of his saddest stories, 
when he made the robber beat the life out of his 



270 THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR OF CHRIST 

companion because she struggled to escape from 
her shame and be better. Nay, Nathan touched 
this chord long before, when in his parable to the 
guilty David he roused the royal indignation 
against the sinner until he cried, " He shall surely 
die." Although the sin was his own, thinly dis- 
guised, yet he worked himself into a fine frenzy of 
unsympathizing anger against it. Sinners do not 
sympathize with sinners in their efforts to escape 
from sin. Men, bribed in elections, ring-thieves, 
and other low villains who are not so tenderly dealt 
with, will turn on their companions when dollars 
can be made out of playing the informer, and sac- 
rifice them ruthlessly for gain or safety. Have you 
never heard how the play goes on in the gambhng 
house halls when one miserable wretch shoots him- 
self in his despair ; how when the poor child on 
the trapeze falls and is broken, the audience clamors 
for the performance to go forward ; how the man 
that was himself a slave makes the most savage 
slave-driver? At this moment the world's helpers 
and healers are those who are farthest removed from 
the weakness that needs helping, and the wicked- 
ness that needs healing. Fair, pure women, who 
are as far from falling as the mother of Jesus her- 
self, are seeking the outcast ; honest men, never 
tempted to fraud, are preaching integrity. Men 
and women from the heights are going down into 
the depths. Who feels the darkness so intensely 



THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR OF CHRIST 27I 

as he who lives in the light ? Who should yearn 
over the prodigal like him who has been ever in his 
father's house? The great passion of Jesus for 
seeking and saving the lost, was a purpose born of 
a knowledge of what heaven meant, and what the 
Father's love was, and how glorious it was to have 
salvation — a passion, believe me, such as no sinful 
being could have touched in its intensity. 

(3) This leads me to the third point. I have 
said that sin is not essential to sympathy and suc- 
cor ; then that sin is actually opposed to sympathy 
and succor. Now, I lay on the top-stone in the 
assertion that sin can be destroyed by sympathy 
and succor. Read the seventeenth verse, ** Where- 
fore ." Sin would have unfitted Christ to sym- 
pathize perfectly, and it would utterly have unfitted 
him to save. Christ was sinless. This point is 
generally conceded by all readers of the Gospels. 
A man has to be far gone in skepticism who denies 
it. For us the words of Scripture will suffice as to 
the immaculate nature of his mind : " He was 
holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners." 
He could affirm boldly as none other could or can, 
*' The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing 
in me." Yet he was full of sympathy, he was quick 
with succor. Yes ; but for what ? With the sin ? 
No ; this is our feeling. '* Well ; I do it myself, 
do not be hard on the man." Men are afraid to 
condemn sin because the condemnation rebounds. 



2']2 THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR OF CHRIST 

And let me say that a great deal of the effeminate 
sentimentalism in which many persons indulge when 
treating of sin springs from this consciousness, and 
not from any true and noble feeling. Men preach 
softly of the sinner falling into drunkenness, prof- 
ligacy, deceit, and those listening give them credit 
for an exquisite generous sympathy with the trans- 
gressor ; all the while they are covertly defending 
the transgression. Of course, this is abhorrent to 
God ; it is utterly and absolutely unchristlike. 
Christ never helped sin, but he did, to the very 
uttermost, help the sinner. Christ knew what it 
was to be that sinner without the sin, so he was 
"able to succor them that were tempted." The 
captain of an Atlantic steamer, out in a storm, will 
speak with a feeling to which you on the land must 
be a stranger, of weaker vessels than his exposed 
to the same hurricane. As his ship toils and strug- 
gles, thrills and trembles, he feels what the thun- 
derous shock of those cataract waves must be to 
yonder other and frailer craft. So our Lord has, 
through that human experience of his a rare power 
of sympathy. ** He knows what sore temptation 
means, for he has felt the same." Then, because 
he was so perfectly pure in himself he could be the 
Saviour of all that believe in him. Such salvation 
would have been impossible had he borne the 
slightest shadow of a stain of personal transgression. 
Are there those listening to me to whom this load 



THE SYMPATHY AND SUCCOR OF CHRIST 2/3 

of sin has become weil-nigh intolerable? "Be- 
hold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin 
of the world." "A merciful, faithful high priest in 
things pertaining to God, he is able to make recon- 
ciliation for the sins of the people." And are there 
not others who have indeed laid their sins on Jesus, 
but yet need to yield themselves more fully to this 
priceless confidence in his sympathy, who was " in 
all points tempted like as we are," and in his salva- 
tion, who was "yet without sin"? Then "let us 
therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, 
that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help 
in time of need." 



XXI 
SOME UNFINISHED THINGS 



In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 

— Genesis i : i. 

Even so, come, Lord Jesus. 

— Revelation 22 : 20. 



XXI 

SOME UNFINISHED THINGS 

These are the first words and the last in the 
Bible. I have placed them together, not at the bid- 
ding of mere caprice or of idle fancy, but in order 
that we may lay to heart one marked and sugges- 
tive difference between the passage from Genesis 
and the passage from Revelation. We are not 
surprised at the words with which the Scriptures 
open, " In the beginning." This is what we natu- 
rally look for. The Bible is, in many respects, a 
book of beginnings. The Old Testament in our 
text, then the life of Jesus in the Gospel by John, 
then the history of Christian progress in the Acts 
of the Apostles, then the glimpses into heaven in 
the Revelation, bring us face to face with the 
beginning of things. 

But what does this lead us to expect when the 
Scriptures come to a close ? The foundation of 
the building is a promise of completion, and we 
seem to hear the shouts with which, by and by, 
the top-stone shall be brought forth and lifted into 
its place, crown and consummation of the enter- 
prise. Every beginning points forward to the 

277 



2^8 SOME UNFINISHED THINGS 

ending, every Alpha to an Omega, every first to the 
last. Surely, then, the final words of the Bible will 
be final. A conclusion will be reached. This, 
however, as you see from our text, is not the case. 
The Revelation closes without a close. A prayer, 
an aspiration, a note, one might say, of noble dis- 
content is the last sound that we hear. ** Even so 
come. Lord Jesus." ''The Spirit and the bride 
say. Come." The Christ who ascended from 
Olivet is still the object of passionate expectation. 
For this unlooked-for ending of the Bible there 
must be some reason. Would it not be more wel- 
come to us to read across this last page the words 
which we read across the first, '* Then the heaven 
and the earth were finished, and all the hosts of 
them " ? Why, then, are they not there ? What 
profound wisdom is there in the question put by 
a famous writer of our century when he says, 
"Is it not better not to conclude?" We shall 
best answer this inquiry if we think for a while 
of the unfinished things amidst which we are 
living now. 

I. The first of these is our earth. To make such 
an affirmation is not to contradict the earliest words 
in the Bible. The earth was indeed finished, but 
it was so subject to conditions that would inevitably 
change it continually. Was the mountain finished ? 
It was destined nevertheless to alter its form with 
every rolling year and passing season. Was the 



SOME UNFINISHED THINGS 279 

plain ? Now covered with the mighty forest, before 
long the air would resound with the woodsman's 
axe and before many years had passed the popu- 
lous city would rise where once the birds sang 
among the branches and the wild beasts cowered 
in the thickets. Then again the very words of the 
commission given to man at his creation contain 
a prophecy of inevitable change : ''Be fruitful and 
multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it." 
Even yet the aspects of our earth are being trans- 
formed by the tides of population, by the standards 
of conquest, by the tread of the merchant, by the 
plow of the farmer, by the eager eye of the dis- 
coverer. Is Africa finished, when the sun of this 
century has lighted us for the first time to her 
broad rivers ? Is America, when within the mem- 
ory of man the bounds of civilization have been 
carried hundreds of miles to the west? More 
emphatically yet is the truth taught if we consider 
that beneath the skill with which it is builded, the 
beauty with which this earth is clothed, and the 
music with which it is filled, there is a ceaseless 
undertone of expectation. ''The whole creation 
groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." 
The purpose for which the Creator called it into 
being at the first has not yet been reached. It is 
unfinished still. 

2. The second of these incompleted things of 
which we may think is our life. A finished Hfe — did 



280 SOME UNFINISHED THINGS 

you ever see one yet ? It will, I suppose, be granted 
that the majority of lives are not finished. But 
what reason have we to make any exception to the 
broad assertion that this wonderful treasure which 
we call our life is complete in not even one instance ? 
No two lives are alike save in this particular, and 
here all lives are lived in common. The physician 
bent over poor OHver Goldsmith as he lay on his 
dying bed, restless and fevered, and he asked him, 
** Is your mind at ease ? " *' No, it is not," groaned 
the man who had made so many hearts lighter by 
his charming pen, and with these words he passed 
away. How did that confession differ from the 
feeling with which we all bid farewell to this present 
life ? We are none of us satisfied in the sense that 
we have completed our round of being perfectly. 
Never since the very first has any one looking back 
over the finished work said, ** It is very good." 
God might speak thus, but man never ! 

I need not pause to show how emphatically true 
this is as to the failures in life, the " social wreck- 
age " which is evermore being cast up by the ocean 
of time upon the eternal shore ; nor — to glance at 
the opposite extreme — need we linger over our 
children's graves, so pathetically short, so patheti- 
cally numerous, each one of which speaks of hopes 
blighted and plans frustrated and faculties nipped 
in the bud. 

But how many lives are suddenly arrested, as 



SOME- UNFINISHED THINGS 28 1 

was the Alpine cataract centuries ago when against 
it the gauntleted hand of the ice was hfted and it 
froze soHd and immovable to the end of time. To 
think of any life in the full flush of power and 
promise cut off is to think of music carried into 
another room. Somewhere, out of our hearing, 
the strain must certainly be continued. 

Turn from such a Hfe to the most successful. 
At what point is the successful man ready to say, 
" It is done " ? Not because he is still reaping a 
golden harvest, in money, in fame, in friendships, 
no ; but because as yet life has not yielded him 
what he hoped for. When Thomas Carlyle was 
writing his history of Frederick the Great and was 
half-way through with his task, *' he discovered that 
Frederick was not great," and, he says, the disap- 
pointment robbed him of all zest and enthusiasm. 
So men find that what they are pursuing is not the 
noblest and the best, and the shadow of that con- 
viction lies over their enterprise. Success has no 
longer its sparkle and beauty. 

Or think of the Hfe tranquilly pursued to its 
close. " Its close " ? We are still children gather- 
ing the pebbles on the brink of an unexplored 
ocean. ** Oh, sir," exclaimed John Foster, leaning 
over the edge of a precipice, "look down there. 
Look down there, sir. There's a leap, sir ; one 
leap, sir — a bold leap — and in one moment I shall 
know the grand secret i" How fascinating is that 



282 SOME UNFINISHED THINGS 

thought ! But let it be resisted, let our Hfe run its 
course calmly, when the end comes have we any- 
feeling that it is complete ? One of the most bril- 
liant French women of her time said, when in the 
sunset of her days she sat waiting the order of 
release, and her queen asked if she were satisfied, 
" No, I am not at ease, but I am content." Con- 
tent to be discontented. " Not as though I had 
already attained ! " 

You may refer me to the Christian as an excep- 
tion to this rule. But far from being that, he is 
really the most illustrious example of our principle. 
'* We are saved by hope." Do you not remember 
that exquisite touch at the close of *' Pilgrim's 
Progress," when the writer watches the travelers as 
they pass into that city : *' And after that," says he, 
" they shut up the gates ; which, when I had seen, 
I wished myself among them " ? Our joy is in the 
persuasion that here we have no continuing city. 

And I smiled to think God' s greatness flowed around 

our incompleteness, 
Round our restlessness his rest. 

Life is unfinished still. 

3. The third of these incompleted things I 
find in the earthly life of Jesus. Such a life, so 
brief and yet so glorious, is only justified by the 
conviction that elsewhere it had its blossoming. 



SOME UNFINISHED THINGS 283 

Christ's actions were full of unexplained mean- 
ings : "Whither I go thou canst not follow me 
now, but thou shalt follow me hereafter." 

Christ's parables were hid treasure : '' With many- 
such parables spake he the word unto them, as 
they were able to hear it." 

Christ's whole teaching was limited by the small 
capacity of his hearers. He held back the great 
truth that was in his heart bursting for utterance 
with the sad sentence, " I have many things to say 
unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." 

Christ's life, was it complete? In its hour of 
richest promise it was severed by the cross. Christ's 
death, was it complete ? ** He led them out as far 
as unto Bethany, . . and he parted from them." 
Christ's ascension, was it complete? ''This same 
Jesus which is taken up from you into heaven, 
shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him 
go into heaven." Each of these acts was indeed 
complete in itself, but that only because each car- 
ried in it a prophecy of yet better things to come. 
The cradle incomplete without the cross, the cross 
incomplete without the sepulchre, the sepulchre 
incomplete without the mount of ascension, the 
mount of ascension incomplete without the throne, 
the throne incomplete without the coming. The 
disciple who watched his Master vanish in the 
clouds and who heard the angels promise his return 
is he who breathes these last words of the Bible, 



284 SOME UNFINISHED THINGS 

'* Even so, come, Lord Jesus." The life of Jesus 
is in this sense unfinished still. 

4. Once more, we mention, as another of these 
things which are yet incomplete, the gospel. Of 
course there is a sense in which, as the life of Jesus 
on earth is complete, so is this gospel. Nothing 
shall ever be added to it, as from it shall nothing 
be taken. But the life is not complete while it is 
unaccomplished. Oh, there is so much yet to learn 
of that brief but pregnant ministry. And so is it 
with the gospel. Listen : *' The former treatise 
have I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began 
both to do and to teach, until the day in which he 
was taken up." '* Began." Then Christ's acts are 
still being performed and Christ's teachings are 
still being enforced. The gospel is incomplete in 
the world, for we see not yet all things put under 
Him. The gospel is incomplete in the Christian 
fellowship, the church, as we are wont to call it. 
"Waiting for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" 
is the true attitude for us to assume. We scarcely 
dare read what Paul speaks of the future of the 
church : '* A glorious church, not having spot or 
wrinkle or any such thing." It is like deciphering 
an inscription full of patriotic confidence and pride 
on the ruined gate of a captured citadel. Tell me 
that the church of Christ is perfected and I surren- 
der myself to despair. But tell me that in the 
faith in which we all rest, in the hope which we all 



Some unfinished things 2S5 

cherish, in the love which we all strive to encour- 
age, this great fellowship of Christian believers is 
only like the reflection of the stars in the turbid 
and ruffled waters of the sea, and I dare to look 
up again. 

The gospel is incomplete in the soul. I am 
conscious that this divine life struggles vainly for 
full expression in ''this present life." Am I con- 
tent to leave any one of the great doctrines of our 
salvation with the confident assertion that there is 
nothing more in it for me than has already been 
drawn out of it ? Theodore Monod lies dying and 
his friends gather about him to speak of the life, so 
full of holy teaching for them all, that is now draw- 
ing to a close. The old man rises to a loftier 
height than that upon which they were conversing. 
What has he done ? What has he said ? Nay, 
he desires that on his gravestone these words alone 
shall be written, " Thus endeth the first lesson !" 

These, then, are some of the things — and what 
momentous things they are ! — of which we ven- 
ture to say that they are unfinished yet. From 
their highest point of attainment they breathe a 
prayer of passionate aspiration such as closes the 
Bible. An incomplete earth, an incomplete life, 
an incomplete gospel. 

Now let us gather up some few thoughts 
suggested by the truth of which we have been 
speaking. 



2§6 SOME UNFINISHED THINGS 

1. First, then, it is plain that we dwell among un- 
finished things and these the very things which the 
world will not readily let die. How inspiring this 
is. There is a melancholy in traveling in the far 
East among the wrecks of bygone centuries, the 
ruins of half-forgotten empires. There is a sadness 
in wandering on the shore, where every wave flings 
at your feet the empty and broken shell which has 
once been *'some happy creature's palace." But 
to live here is to live looking for the sunrise, to wait 
under the pale light of the stars for the dawn. This 
earth, this life, this gospel, each of them is an unfil- 
filled prophecy; a prophecy which is itself a pledge 
of final fulfillment. I move among their mightiest 
achievements as the Arab among the pyramids in 
whose hearts he believes slumber wonderful stores 
of treasure which shall yet be discovered. 

2. Second, these prophecies shall never be ful- 
filled here. This is to me a most powerful argu- 
ment for immortality. It is as though I had in my 
dreams heard a tune which no instrument on earth 
was capable of rendering. I believe that in another 
sphere that instrument shall be found. I do not 
indeed say that this earth may not yet become 
richer, this life more noble, this gospel more pow- 
erful. I believe they will. But for each of them 
there must be other conditions before they can 
reach completeness. We dwell now among the 
rudiments, the first sketches, the dim outlines : 



SOME UNFINISHED THINGS 28/ 

For still we hope 
That in a world of larger scope, 
What here is faithfully begun 
Will be completed, not undone. 

3. Third, that this should be the case is evi- 
dently in accordance with God's purpose. " The 
highest reach of human science," says the foremost 
metaphysician of his day, *' is the scientific recogni- 
tion of human ignorance." But is this what God 
meant to be the highest point attainable by his 
creature ? ** Nothing is good," it has been affirmed, 
'' which does not carry us beyond itself." Here, 
then, is the condemnation of everything which has 
in itself finality. Oh, the lives which might have 
climbed so high and seen so far and done so much 
which are now ** stunted by preoccupation with 
finite aim " ! What would we do were it not for 
this day, which bids us go up higher ? What, were 
it not for religion, which refuses to let the soul, like 
a blind Samson, grind to the Philistines of money 
making and pleasure taking ? 

4. Lastly, these unfiilfiUed prophecies, never to 
be accomplished here, with this as a divine purpose 
in their heart of hearts, do all point to a fulfillment 
hereafter. 

I scarcely dare enjoy all the wealth of material 
beauty with which this world is so full — its moun- 
tains and its oceans, its dawn and dusk, its splendor 
of stars, its glory of forests, unless I believe this : 



288 SOMF UNFINISHED THINGS 

*' Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look 
for a new heaven and a new earth, wherein dwell- 
eth righteousness." But holding fast by this, to 
me the song of all creation pours itself into this 
mighty confidence, *' It doth not yet appear what 
we shall be." The redeemed life is fuller to me 
of prophecy than it is of fulfillment. " When he 
shall appear we shall be like him." That sight 
shall make our heaven. "We shall be satisfied 
when we awake in his likeness." 

Ah, but better far, Christ himself shall yet be 
satisfied ! Nothing short of that shall do justice to 
the promise of creation, the cost of redemption, 
the aspiration of our own spiritual life. He shall 
come, but the brow shall wear no crown of thorns, 
the hands be pierced no longer by the nails. He 
shall come, but not to a world that offers him only 
a manger for a cradle, only a cross for a deathbed. 
He shall come, but not to cold incredulity, to chill 
indifference, to cruel rejection. He shall come 
to usher in a new creation, to flash the light eternal 
upon this earthly life of his, to gather up the mighty 
purposes throbbing in his gospel as it works the 
world over. " He shall come, to be glorified in 
his saints and to be admired in all them that be- 
lieve in that day." ** Amen. Even so, come, Lord 
Jesus." 



APR 1 1905 



